Vestager report calls for European AI investment, resilience
Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank, said in a Monday speech that Europe must develop its own artificial intelligence technology and build more datacentres to reduce the threat of being cut off from AI tools by the United States or China.
“If Europe invests in its own AI tech,” Lagarde said, “the threat of being cut off loses its force.” Self-sufficiency, she added, would give Europe a chance to develop its own answer to the AI safety crisis.
Lagarde framed the choice in stark terms: Europeans can either shun the technology and lose out on growth, or embrace it and become dependent on tools developed by the US and China. The international debate over AI safety that has erupted in recent days threatens to make the choice moot: if the worst scenarios come to bear – and experts have differing views on this – then the technology will impact the continent regardless.
Europe has largely been absent from the highest levels of the AI safety debate, a result of the continent’s longstanding inability to produce a Silicon Valley-scale titan like Apple, Google or newcomer OpenAI. While Europe is a powerhouse in regulation, much to the White House’s chagrin, its lack of an Anthropic or Nvidia-sized frontrunner in the AI race has diminished its voice in the safety debate.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen addressed the gap this week, saying she would “invite the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.” Her remarks drew less attention than comments from US President Donald Trump and from China dismissing any slowdown. Without Washington or Beijing support, any form of pacing would be impossible regardless of Europe’s input.
Margrethe Vestager, who clashed with US tech firms as the EU’s former competition commissioner, co-authored a report this week titled “A Transformative AI Strategy for Europe” that echoed Lagarde’s warning. The report said AI threatens to accelerate a development already affecting Europe, where citizens “are already bearing the economic and social consequences of decisions taken elsewhere.”
The report’s recommendations included building more datacentres and ensuring Europe is resilient enough to withstand “AI crises” such as a powerful model slipping out of control.
Vestager said Europe does have a voice in the safety debate through the EU AI Act, the rare piece of AI legislation that requires developers of “high-risk” systems to report safety incidents and address risks including a cutting-edge model evading control. Yet she added that Europe must “build its own AI to strengthen the ecosystem, retain talent, and inspire innovation.”
Vestager acknowledged that if there is an existential threat, it requires a global solution – one that does not hand power to the US and China – and that it requires a different kind of supranational body. “As for existential threats to humanity, we must first assess the actual level of threat – then act with urgency. The UN general assembly is an opportunity to address this. It is vital to move beyond the US-China rivalry narrative. There must be space for humanity between the egos of leaders like President Xi and President Trump,” she said.
Frederike Kaltheuner, an adviser to the AI Now Institute, a research body, said Europe is dependent on US technology in ways that will be hard to undo, from search engines to chips to datacentres. But the narrative that Europe is “grievously behind” in the race, she said, depends on a particular view of artificial intelligence aggressively promoted by American tech bosses.
“Because of their doomsday warnings,” Kaltheuner added, “we are exclusively talking about AI in a very narrow, specific kind of way – namely, the idea that there is such a thing as the AI frontier, which is getting better and better, and that access to the frontier is the most important thing that Europe needs for its security and economy.”
The reality of the market points elsewhere, she said: many companies are not adopting so-called “frontier models” – like ChatGPT and Anthropic – because of high costs and fears over what might happen to their data. If that trend continues, Kaltheuner added, Europe may not be so terribly positioned. The EU AI Act includes pragmatic measures addressing how consumers encounter AI on a day-to-day basis, including labelling of AI-generated content and rules on AI use in medicine and hiring.
Georgina Kon, a partner at the law firm Linklaters, said the EU AI Act is unlikely to be adopted as a global benchmark for several reasons, including criticism of its heavy compliance burden, which has led to delays in parts of the act becoming active, and a narrow territorial focus on Europe. Those criticisms, she said, have led lawmakers elsewhere to differentiate their approach from the EU’s. “The EU AI Act is not something that everybody else in the world feels constrained by, although many tech companies will of course want to sell to the EU,” she said.
Itxaso Dominguez de Olazabal, a policy adviser at EDRI, a European digital rights organisation, said Europe does have a competitiveness problem. But US tech boosters, she said, are “blaming it on laws and protections, and have promised that deregulation will make European companies more competitive … in a race to the bottom to see if we can catch big tech.”
Big tech still has a vast customer base in Europe. Kaltheuner worries that the doomsday narratives will push Europe towards dependency, encouraging the continent to adopt US AI models across the economy out of ill-defined fears of being left behind. “There’s a vision of the future where Europe’s economy, its public sector, its education system runs on models and on infrastructure that is controlled by a very small number of companies that happen to be also in the US,” she said. “This would be a sovereignty problem.”