Artificial intelligence represents a crucial arena in which state power is articulated, as well as a strategic asset within the dynamics of global technological competition. Owing to its cross-cutting nature, it profoundly affects governance models and paradigms of development, raising questions regarding technological sovereignty and the regulatory capacity of states. Within this framework, national artificial intelligence strategies should be understood as discursive and sociotechnical constructs through which states produce imaginaries of the future, define normative priorities, and perform their international positioning. The contribution offers a comparative analysis of the strategies adopted by European countries, with the aim of examining how they contribute to the multilayered construction of a EU’s governance of artificial intelligence.