Europe debates the Artificial State while GPS keeps getting jammed

Jill Lepore's essay on the Artificial State, published today in Agenda Digitale, argues that platforms, data and algorithms have spent two decades quietly privatising functions that used to belong to public authority: adjudication, eligibility, even the shape of political attention. She is writing mostly about the United States, but the essay reads like an indirect brief for the EU AI Act, Europe's attempt to put exactly that kind of delegation back under public rules rather than corporate defaults.

The same day supplied a smaller, more literal version of her argument. Agenda Digitale also reported that GPS jamming and spoofing now pose a documented risk to European telecoms, finance and transport, serious enough that the European Space Agency is building a real time detection system rather than waiting for the next incident. Two days ago this column noted that Europe's own clocks, the timing signal banks and power grids run on, still lean on GPS. Today's story reads the same dependency as an active attack surface rather than a latent one: the public function Lepore worries is quietly ceded to algorithmic control has, in this case, been quietly ceded to a foreign-run satellite constellation instead, and it is now being probed.

An Artificial State does not need an algorithm if a jammed satellite signal will do.

A third item makes the same split visible inside a single company. OpenAI hired Meta executive Sandhya Devanathan to run commercial growth and regulatory engagement across Southeast Asia and Australia, a market of more than 600 million people, the same week it confirmed it is expanding its Dublin and Brussels teams, but for policy and engineering, not sales. That formalises the OpenAI Europe pattern this column flagged in mid August, when a Berlin office opening deepened Europe's dependence on a US-run AI stack in its own largest market: Europe gets the compliance desk, growth goes elsewhere. Mistral's Le Chat is the standing alternative to that arrangement, a European-built assistant, even if this column has previously noted that Mistral's own compute and capital ties are more tangled than a sovereign-AI headline suggests.

Consumers…

None of this shows up on a phone screen until it breaks. GPS underpins far more than turn by turn directions: today's story points to critical infrastructure and mobile networks leaning on the same signal. A spoofing incident serious enough to worry the European Space Agency is a consumer problem in waiting, even though today's reporting describes a growing risk rather than a disruption that has already reached anyone's handset.

Businesses…

Companies in logistics, finance and telecoms should treat GPS resilience as a supply chain question, the same category as a chip shortage, not a niche satellite issue for someone else to solve. Any European business weighing an AI vendor now has a live comparator too: OpenAI's Dublin and Brussels expansion buys compliance cover, not commercial partnership, while Mistral and Aleph Alpha are pitching to build with European customers rather than just answer to European regulators.

Government…

Lepore's essay is worth reading in Brussels specifically because the EU AI Act is the concrete European answer to the abstract problem she describes, and its credibility depends on regulators showing that human institutions, not platform defaults, still decide what public functions get automated. That credibility has a blind spot the essay never mentions: the AI Act can constrain how an algorithm is used, but it cannot make Europe's timing and positioning infrastructure sovereign, and the European Space Agency's new detection system is a defensive patch, not an ownership fix. The eurostack argument applies as much to positioning and timing infrastructure as it does to compute, and governments funding sovereign AI ambitions should ask why the same urgency has not reached satellite positioning.

Further today

• Maastricht-based Clementine raises €1.7 million to scale AI-powered hearing care platform · EU-Startups
• Portugal: Tesla claims FSD will save lives and prevent dozens of accidents monthly · Pplware
• Irish software firm Cubic3 plans job cuts amid financial struggles · Silicon Republic
• Swedish Readily Diagnostics receives €811k for affordable STI testing · EU-Startups
• French quantum scale-up Pasqal lists on Nasdaq with €309 million cash · EU-Startups

Sources

• Historian Jill Lepore's essay on the Artificial State argues platforms have privatised public functions, directly engaging the AI Act's rationale · Agenda Digitale
• GPS jamming and spoofing pose a growing risk to European infrastructure, prompting the European Space Agency to build a real time detection system · Agenda Digitale
• OpenAI hired Meta executive Sandhya Devanathan to lead growth across Southeast Asia and Australia while expanding its Dublin and Brussels policy and engineering teams · The Next Web