It’s 2031 and the US and China are about to tear Europe into pieces.

The US ploughed vast sums into datacentres and the EU did not. China built robots and Europe did not. American companies “restructured” their workflows around AI and fired people, while EU workers went on long lunch breaks and handed over administrative tasks to the AI model Claude.

Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Europe’s economy is a shambles because it does not have its own AI. Populism is surging, the euro is wobbling, cyber-attacks are shredding EU businesses. Brexit seemed like a good idea. It looks like the end of the European Union.

That, at least, is the vision of a speculative thought experiment, called Europe 2031, penned by Brussels-based thinktankers and published fortuitously one day before the Trump administration decided to block “foreign nationals” from using a much-hyped AI model built by Anthropic, called Fable.

In the heady week of G7 talks that followed, the scenario has gone viral – feeding a feverish discussion of the urgency for EU tech sovereignty. It has been read by members of the European parliament and, say its authors, was brought up in track 1.5 discussions between British and German officials earlier this week.

Its authors say they feel “vindicated”, by the attention it has received and by the fact that one of their predictions – that the US would restrict global access to advanced AI models – appears to have briefly come true. They hope the scenario will spur Europe towards a dramatic course-correction on AI.

The piece is part of a burgeoning genre of fictional AI doomsday scenarios, created by obscure figures, which have gained surprising traction among policymakers over the past year. In 2025 there was AI 2027, a thought experiment which culminates in a superintelligent AI killing all of humanity to make way for more datacentres; in February, another speculative scenario imagined AI upending the US economy. (The first was read by US vice-president JD Vance, the second contributed to a stock market wobble.)

One complication of all this might be that their thought experiment is at times based on current developments in AI whose outcome is uncertain or in doubt.

Maximilian Negele contributed to Europe 2031, he says, because of the “incredible translation barrier” between Brussels and San Francisco, where AI is being developed. Formerly at US thinktank Rand, he left his job this year to focus on the project.

“As somebody who travels to San Francisco quite a bit and talks to people there, what is happening in Europe just seemed like a slow-moving car crash to me,” he says.

The scenario unfolds from the perspective of a fictional bright-eyed Brussels staffer, Caroline Dubois, who has a German friend, Christian Vogt, with a startup in San Francisco. On a visit, she’s impressed by America’s “70 or 80-hour” working weeks and discomfited by the conviction among tech bros that everything is about to change.

Back in Europe, she works to evangelise her well-meaning bosses about the impending AI future – but fails to convince. There’s too much scepticism, and most people think AI is a bubble.

Things go from there. The Americans spend huge sums on a massive AI building programme – the scenario highlights a real-life $100bn (£75bn) deal between OpenAI and Nvidia, the $300bn agreement between OpenAI and Oracle, and “bulldozers” breaking earth in Texas for an AI datacentre. Europeans, meanwhile, put forward a tepid investment package and ignore advisers’ pleas for “a full regulatory carte blanche for datacentre providers”.

In a matter of years, America monopolises 70% of the world’s “compute” – the semiconductor chips that fill the datacentres that power AI models. Europe’s economy is meanwhile gasping for air, mostly because its companies have not adopted AI.

As AI-powered cyber-attacks shred European firms and unemployment surges, EU officials scramble to parlay their one last bargaining chip – the Dutch lithography firm ASML, which is vital to the production of AI semiconductors – into concessions from Beijing or Washington. But it’s too late. The US deploys powerful “frontier AI” spyware and learns the deepest fears of EU officials and also which of them are having affairs.

Curtains drop. Christian and Caroline exeunt stage left for a drink. Disaster impends.

Sceptical readers might point out that a number of the eye-popping sums and big projects that the authors name-check in describing America’s AI ascent have already fallen apart.

The $100bn agreement between OpenAI and Nvidia, the biggest AI deal of last year, evaporated in February. The $300bn between OpenAI and Oracle seems doubtful, especially as recent reports indicate the maker of ChatGPT is still billions of dollars underwater as it burns money on datacentre infrastructure.

The bulldozers on the ground in Texas may not be bulldozing very much any more, as OpenAI pulled out of the flagship AI project to which that moment in the scenario seems to refer.

The authors are sanguine about these matters. Throughout the piece, they pre-empt potential objections – such as AI being overhyped – by suggesting that the hapless European officials have these worries, too, and they end up tragically wrong.

“I wouldn’t rule out that there’s some exuberance and that one or two AI companies might go bankrupt,” says Negele. “But what we wanted to get across is a general feel for a version of what we think will happen.”

He and his co-author, Alex Petropolous, agree that there could be some bumps in the road – including mounting resistance to datacentres in the US. “I mean, people hate AI in general. A lot of people do. People hate datacentres. They destroy the landscape. They support big tech. It’s a very, very unpopular policy.”

The authors of Europe 2031 think that the solution to this is datacentres. Europe needs to build more, faster, ideally in AI zones where matters such as power and planning can be streamlined and deregulated.

“I think our view is that the total datacentre supply is quite an inelastic supply. So there will only be a limited number of datacentres built in the world built every year, and the question is, how many of those do you want built in the US? How many of those do you want built in Europe?” says Petropolous.

It is further worth noting that the main organisation behind the Europe 2031 scenario, Arq Foundation, based in Brussels, describes itself as “neither an advocacy NGO nor a venture-backed startup” and does not disclose who funds it.

Brussels politicians who read it, though, may take away a simpler message: the scenario has crystallised a conversation about the need for Europe to have technological sovereignty.

“This scenario, Europe 2031, I believe that some of the parts they mentioned can happen,” says Nicolás Casares, a member of the European parliament from Spain. “But I think they are increasing – a bit – the alarms in order to call our attention.”

The US cutting off Europe’s access to Fable, he says, means that the EU needs to ask itself harder questions about who is building its AI infrastructure and who will benefit from it.

“What is the added value of having OpenAI or Anthropic datacentres in Europe?” he says.

“We are buying a narrative that we need a lot of datacentres not to lose the race for AI. But this is crazy … we are paving the way for infrastructure that they will use and sometimes not allow us the possibility of using it.”