Europe Absent From AI Safety Debate as Leaders Urge Self-Reliance

Lagarde said Monday that Europe must develop its own AI technology and build more data centers to nullify the threat of being cut off by the US or China. If Europe invests in its own AI tech, she said, “the threat of being cut off loses its force.” Self-sufficiency would also give Europe a chance to develop its own answer to the AI safety crisis.

The debate over AI safety that erupted in recent days threatens to make that choice moot, The Guardian reported. If the worst scenarios materialize, the technology will affect the continent regardless, though experts have differing views on those scenarios.

Europe’s absence from the top levels of the debate stems from its longstanding inability to produce a Silicon Valley-scale titan such as Apple, Google or OpenAI, according to the report. Europe is a regulatory powerhouse, a role that has annoyed the White House, but its lack of an Anthropic- or Nvidia-sized front-runner in the AI race has diminished its voice in the safety debate.

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, addressed the issue by 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 gained nowhere as much traction as Donald Trump’s and China’s dismissal of a slowdown. Without support from Washington or Beijing, any pacing is impossible, with or without Europe’s input, The Guardian reported.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s former competition commissioner who clashed with the US tech industry, co-authored a report this week, A Transformative AI Strategy for Europe, that echoed Lagarde’s warning. AI threatens to accelerate a development already affecting Europe, where citizens “are already bearing the economic and social consequences of decisions taken elsewhere,” she said.

The report’s solutions include building more data centers, described as the central nervous systems of AI, and ensuring the continent 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, which sets requirements for developers of “high-risk” AI systems to report safety incidents and address risks such as a cutting-edge model evading control. But she added: “Europe must … build its own AI to strengthen the ecosystem, retain talent, and inspire innovation.”

Vestager acknowledged that an existential threat would require a global solution, one that does not hand power to the US and China, and said 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, said Europe is dependent on US technology in ways that will be hard to undo, from search engines to chips to data centers. But she said the narrative that Europe is grievously behind in the race depends on a particular view of artificial intelligence aggressively promoted by American tech bosses. Because of their doomsday warnings, “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 market points to something else, Kaltheuner said: many companies are not adopting so-called frontier models, such as ChatGPT and Anthropic, because of high costs and fears over what might happen to their data. If that trend continues, Europe may not be so terribly positioned, according to The Guardian. The EU AI Act contains pragmatic measures addressing how consumers might encounter AI day to day, including rules on labeling AI content and the use of AI in medicine and hiring.

“Europe has a competitiveness problem, that’s true,” said Itxaso Dominguez de Olazabal, a policy adviser at EDRI, a European digital rights organization. But US tech boosters 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.”