Profit-driven platforms turn users into the product. Europe must build sovereign AI infrastructure or surrender cognitive agency.
AI risk “AI eats its users” in Eurasia Group’s Top Risks for 2026 is not about sentient machines, but human incentives pushing platforms to exploit users, data, and democracies at scale. Platforms capture attention, shape behaviors, and often do so without adequate rules or informed consent, much like social networks before. If AI’s goal shifts to keeping users engaged for monetization rather than helping them, users become the product, just as in social media.
What “AI Eats Its Users” Really Means
“Eating the user” is not a metaphor for Skynet, but for three interlocking dynamics.
First, hyper-personalized manipulation: models optimized not for accuracy or user benefit, but for engagement, addiction, and behavioral nudging in politics, consumption, and opinion-formation. Reinforcement learning loops learn exactly which prompts keep users online and which narratives maximize outrage or conversion.
Second, data and attention arbitrage: platforms using user prompts, private documents, and interaction histories as raw material to train systems, with opaque consent and weak controllability for individuals. This is the classic surveillance capitalism model amplified by AI assistants embedded in productivity suites, browsers, OSes, and search, turning every interaction into training data.
Third, algorithmic power concentration: a small group of frontier model providers sits at the core of information flows, mediating what citizens, workers, and decision-makers see, learn, and believe. This creates de facto infrastructural power without commensurate accountability, similar to social media – but now embedded into work, education, governance, health, and defense.
In this sense, AI does not just “eat” users individually; it erodes the informational substrate of democratic deliberation and potentially rational policy-making.
Attention Economy 2.0
Social media optimized for scrolls and outrage; AI supercharges it with personalized prompts. Models might prioritize engagement over accuracy, delivering fast food answers and dopamine hits per response. Infinite info access meets shrinking judgment: environments reward non-thinking – the predictable outcome of systems designed to capture and monetize our most finite resource: attention.
The Monetization Imperative
With forecasted AI investments reaching $3 trillion by 2030, platforms face intense pressure to deliver returns. Social media monetized through scroll time and ad targeting; AI will likely follow suit, measuring prompt sessions and harvesting query data to fuel revenue models. This profit-maximizing trajectory -while not inevitable – poses a credible risk of users becoming the product once again, their interactions powering the very systems they depend on.
Epic Digital Surrender Deepens
Building on our Epic Digital Surrender: Europe outsourced clouds to American hyperscalers; social networks to US/China; and now we cede AI cognition to US/China stacks that mediate reasoning and decisions. Regulation shines (AI Act, GDPR), but lacks frontier models or compute sovereignty. In short, we users gift US and China with our (limited) attention.
Path Forward: Sovereignty Over Extraction
Beyond rules, Europe must act decisively. Build owned infrastructure: publicly backed GPU clouds and open-ish models accessible to SMEs. Ban extraction: separate assistants from ads and nudges, mandate granular opt-outs from training data use. Establish audit power: independent red-teaming and transparency mandates on non-EU platforms. Harden democracy: treat AI disinformation as cross-border threats and invest in AI literacy for institutions and citizens.
AI sitting in every decision loop demands constitutional terms. Europe must evolve from extractable users to sovereign citizens with agency – or get systematically consumed.
A European Response Beyond “More Regulation”
A credible response must go beyond risk catalogs and compliance checklists.
For a European, sovereignty-focused perspective, at least four axes are non-negotiable:
Build and own essential AI infrastructure
Publicly backed, independently governed European GPU and AI cloud capacity, accessible to startups, academia and SMEs at competitive terms. Strategic support for open(ish) European models and tooling, with clear standards for safety, auditability and interoperability that prevent lock-in without banning scale.
Hard constraints on extractive business models
Enforce real separation between “assistant” roles and advertising/behavioral targeting – an AI assistant should not double as a persuasion engine. Mandate data minimization, explicit training-consent options for users and enterprises, and robust rights to opt-out of model training without losing access to essential services.
Radical transparency and auditability
Independent European capabilities to perform red-teaming, systemic risk assessments and content provenance checks on major AI platforms, including non-European ones. Obligations for providers to expose meaningful system cards, training data categories, and interfaces for third-party audit – not just ethics reports.
Protect the democratic sphere as critical infrastructure
Treat election-related information operations, AI-driven disinformation and influence campaigns as cross-border security threats, not merely content moderation issues. Invest in media literacy, AI literacy and institutional resilience (courts, parliaments, regulators with technical depth), so that human institutions do not become mere consumers of AI-produced narratives.
If AI is going to sit in the loop of every decision, Europe must define the constitutional terms under which that is acceptable.
From “Users” to “Citizens with Agency”
For cybersec.cafe’s audience, the key message is that the “AI eats its users” scenario is not a distant, abstract risk. It is already visible in the concentration of AI traffic around a tiny set of platforms; the reuse of enterprise and personal data to train models without granular, intelligible consent; and the dependence of European businesses, administrations and even regulators on AI services whose strategic roadmap is set in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen.
An European answer cannot just aim to “protect users”. It must aim to create citizens with agency in an AI-mediated world: people, institutions and companies that can choose, contest, switch and, when necessary, build their own cognitive infrastructure instead of being quietly consumed by someone else’s model.
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