Pedro Sánchez announced that Spain wants a national agreement with unions and business leaders next month to regulate artificial intelligence. Twelve months of roadmap, an AI gigafactory, models trained using the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and an education system that promises to adapt in order to prepare young people for jobs that don't quite exist yet. It sounds ambitious. It also sounds like well-trodden ground.
IA360 is a governance plan because it seeks to bring the State, workers, and companies to a common table before technology imposes its own rules. That table defines its operational core. Sánchez isn't just offering infrastructure: he openly criticizes tech leaders who reject any regulation whatsoever, which is unusual among government officials who typically compete to attract investment from those same firms.
Spain confronts the tech giants instead of settling for tax incentives because the legitimacy of building its own infrastructure grants it real negotiating leverage. Whoever owns part of the technical base can discuss rules without sounding like they're pleading. This pattern shows up across different technological cycles. The European Union negotiated the AI Act for years. The companies affected diluted key provisions through lobbying. The United States lacks coherent federal regulation and lets five or six companies set the pace.
Spain is testing a hybrid path with IA360. It's building state capacity, the gigafactory, the Barcelona supercomputer, to reduce total dependence on Silicon Valley. But building your own infrastructure and achieving real independence don't always go hand in hand. Amazon publicly warned about risks from Anthropic, a company it had invested billions in. Whoever builds the structure often ends up managing the supposed check on it too. A supercomputer funded by the State but running on chips, architectures, and base models from the very companies being criticized rarely escapes that dynamic.
An agreement with unions and employers on artificial intelligence needs binding weight on layoffs and retraining. Otherwise it becomes a photo op. In Ulsan, Hyundai workers stopped the line in front of Atlas. No table beforehand. Just a strike. The Luddite Manifesto emerged from a similar frustration: artisans who destroyed looms because no one had sat them down to negotiate the change. If the Spanish pact stays symbolic, the outcome will look similar. Only with a union tradition that still carries real strength.
The educational ambition sets this plan apart. Adapting the school system for AI jobs sounds sensible on paper. But it runs into an uncomfortable reality: no one knows for certain which jobs will survive five years from now. Microsoft executives talk about automating a large share of office work within short timeframes. The speed of technological change far outpaces the reform capacity of any education system. Training teenagers for roles that may not even exist creates a tension no twelve-month decree can solve.
Sánchez's central argument holds that AI should reduce inequality rather than widen it. Stated intentions rarely match distributed outcomes. Cybersyn in Chile tried to use information technology to democratize economic decisions in real time. It worked partially for a few months. The 1973 coup cut it short. The lesson isn't that civic projects are useless. Without sustained will and institutional safeguards, any structure can be captured or reversed. Spain shows declared political will. The institutional safeguards needed for IA360 to survive a change of government or later pressures remain unconfirmed.
Another question deserves attention: who actually audits the models coming out of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center? The Generosity in the Doorway examines how citizen interpretability, the idea that someone without technical training can understand why a system decided something, remains an unfulfilled promise. A government can own the hardware and still lack real capacity to explain, line by line, the decisions made by its own model. Nominal ownership of the server doesn't equal technical command. The same thing happened in experiences where the cooperative held legal title but transparency depended on whoever was reviewing the code.
I don't have a clear answer as to whether IA360 will work. No one does yet. What's valuable is that Spain is attempting to build a three-legged table, State, unions, companies, when most countries prefer to let technology race ahead and patch things up later. Building the table before the fire starts seems like the smarter strategy. A three-legged table, though, needs each leg to carry real weight, not just hold a symbolic seat.
The entire vocabulary of IA360, gigafactory, roadmap, national agreement, belongs to those who already have fiscal capacity and political voice. Data center operators in other regions, outsourced workers already being displaced, don't even appear in the Spanish conversation. This isn't a criticism aimed solely at Sánchez. It's a pattern that keeps repeating. Negotiations happen where power is already visible. Three legs. Will they be enough to hold the weight?
