At the mid-year Cerebral Valley AI Summit in London on Wednesday, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez and Sequoia Capital partner Luciana Lixandru saw opportunity in European leaders’ realization that they can no longer rely on the United States of America. Gomez is merging his foundation model business with a German model provider, stating, “We want to build this alliance to help create capability beyond just one democracy.” Sequoia co-led a €500 million round in Stark Defense, a startup making kamikaze drones. Lixandru said, “Unfortunately, there’s nothing like conflict at the doorstep to really wake you up as a government.” An anonymous survey of 57 attendees found the majority thought the AI industry was in a bubble, with 51% saying “yes bubble, not bursting this year” and 5% saying “yes bubble, yes about to burst.” When asked what private unicorn they would like to own at today’s valuation, 54% said Anthropic, while 33% answered OpenAI for what company they would most like to short. An off-stage conversation with Dust co-founder Stanislas Polu highlighted that the industry is still sorting out agent form factors. Recursive co-founder and CTO Josh Tobin noted that compute is still hard to find.