Intelligence Crisis, Europe’s Rearmament Boom & The End Of AI Safety

Upside is a weekly review of all of the news affecting European venture, startups and investing. VC Hosts: Dan, Mads, Lomax[03:05] Nvidia Earnings — 14th consecutive beat. Data centre rev up 75% to $62B. Stock basically flat. The market has priced in perfection. Bull case: 16x 2028 earnings, Rubin shipping, China at zero = pure upside. Bear case: custom ASICs climbing, 75% margins under siege. "The question is whether the AI companies can actually monetise it."[09:11] Ukraine, Four Years On — From aid recipient to defence-tech supplier. Ukrainian startups raised $105M in 2025 — a third of all European early-stage defence capital. European defence budgets heading from ~$300B to ~$600B. Defence tech investment: $100M in 2019 → $1.5B in 2025. The 100:1 drone kill ratio is extraordinary economics. War is maths, and Ukraine is winning it.[23:30] Anthropic's Safety Meets Reality — Founded to be the safe one. Now dropping guardrails weeks after a $30B raise. Pentagon threatened to brand them a supply chain risk. Lomax: "Call me cynical." Mads: "Existential threats rewire moral calculus. It happened to OpenAI. It happened to Google. Now it's Anthropic's turn." RIP Bletchley Park.[29:25] Chinese Distillation — 24,000 fake accounts. 16M exchanges. DeepSeek, Moonshot and Minimax caught training on Anthropic's models at industrial scale. National security issue? Obviously. But China has a chokehold on the US defence supply chain, so good luck with that conversation.[32:00] Anthropic Goes Enterprise — Salesforce, Slack, DocuSign integrations. Partner or Trojan horse? Mads: building enterprise apps is way harder than vibe coding on a Thursday afternoon.[35:30] SaaSpocalypse or Renaissance? — The market can't decide. Current thesis: SaaS = system of record, AI = system of action. Honest answer? Nobody knows.[36:20] AI Margins — OpenAI hit 33% gross margin (targeted 46%). Anthropic hit 30% (targeted 40%). Nearly $4B spent on free users. Break-even pushed to 2028-2030. Lomax: "Can you run a giant tech company on 30% gross margin? The multiple doesn't work."[41:45] European Quantum — Funding hit $1.5B in 2025 (+170% YoY). Strong science layer, governments actually buying from startups. But PsiQuantum alone raised $1B in the US. Mads: "Europe has €16T in pension capital. The deficit is plumbing, not capability."[52:45] The Doomsday Paper — "What if AI succeeds so hard it triggers a macro crisis?" Mads dismantles it. Jamie Dimon tie-in: maybe SaaS is the new subprime.[57:35] Deal of the Week — Wayve raising $1.2B at $8.6B. First automotive investor: Nissan.[58:20] Week Ahead — UK Spring Statement. DeepSeek DBC-4. OpenAI $100B round. Hegseth vs Amodei showdown — Dan's prediction: Anthropic caves.