Daniel Mügge
Professor of Political Arithmetic, University of Amsterdam
About
Daniel Mügge is Professor of Political Arithmetic at the University of Amsterdam, where he studies how the numbers that govern public life get made and whom they serve. He came to AI from political economy, by way of financial markets and a body of work arguing that the figures states steer by — GDP, trade balances, inflation — are political artefacts rather than neutral readings. Since a 2022 NWO Vici grant he has led RegulAite, a project on 'AI diplomacy': the EU's external relations in AI with the United States and China, and its part in multilateral efforts to regulate it. With Regine Paul and Vali Stan he wrote The AI Matrix: Profits, Power, Politics (2025, open access), which asks not what AI can do but who owns it, who can pay for it, and how everyone else must adjust. His case for digital sovereignty is unusually willing to concede ground — the claim that Europe is impoverished by American ownership is, he argues, vastly exaggerated in a world of globalised capital flows; what is actually lost is a society's capacity to decide what kind of digitisation happens to it.
Key Contributions
- Leads RegulAite (2022 NWO Vici grant), studying AI diplomacy — the EU's external AI relations with the US and China, and its role in multilateral regulation
- Co-wrote The AI Matrix: Profits, Power, Politics (2025, open access) with Regine Paul and Vali Stan, reframing AI as a question of ownership and payment rather than capability
- Coordinates the AI & Politics research priority area at the UvA Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences
- Argued across a decade of work, including 'Economic statistics as political artefacts' (2020), that the measures governments steer by are constructed rather than found
- Published 'EU AI sovereignty: for whom, to what end, and to whose benefit?' (Journal of European Public Policy, 2024), pressing on who actually gains when sovereignty is invoked
Videos & Interviews
Connections
Simon Johnson
KindredProfessor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan
An alignment of argument rather than a documented exchange: two political economists who refuse the premise that technology has a direction of its own. Johnson reads a thousand years of machinery in Power and Progress and finds that new tools spread their gains only when institutions force them to, and otherwise concentrate them. Mügge arrives at the same place from the regulatory end, sorting innovation into the good, the useless and the harmful and asking what a society would have to do to get more of the first — a question that only makes sense if the mix is something chosen. For both, 'will it be adopted' is the wrong question and 'on whose terms' is the right one.
Tristan Harris
KindredCo-Founder & President, Center for Humane Technology
The same diagnosis reached from opposite institutions. Harris built a movement on the claim that engagement-optimised design overrides the intentions of the person using it; Mügge, discussing the Digital Fairness Act then under debate in Brussels, describes teenagers who say plainly that the feed is bad for them and still cannot put it down, and reaches for the tobacco analogy — people need and appreciate a little help keeping a thing at bay. Where Harris made the case in the language of design ethics and public attention, Mügge makes it in the language of statute: limits on autoplay and similar patterns, argued for precisely because individual willpower is the wrong place to put the load.
Ben Thompson
In contrastFounder & Author, Stratechery
An instructive opposition: they describe the same machine and disagree about whether it should be allowed to run. Thompson's Aggregation Theory explains how platforms win by owning the relationship with the user and becoming the default way in — an account of strategy, told with admiration for how well it works. Mügge describes the same arrangement from inside it: a setting that cannot be switched off, data that cannot be moved, an account opened at fourteen with no clean way out. He reads that as the case for interoperability mandates and a right of exit. One frames lock-in as the elegance of the strategy, the other as the reason public authorities have something to do.
