Published on 16/09/2026 – 9:41 GMT+2
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
The European Union will support industry initiatives to slow the development of highly disruptive AI technologies and will collaborate with international partners, including Canada and the UK, on AI safety, the Commission chief announced on Wednesday.
In her annual State of the Union address to the European Parliament, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen highlighted artificial intelligence’s vast potential to benefit humanity, emphasizing that its risks and opportunities must be carefully balanced.
She specifically pointed to the escalating dangers posed by so-called frontier AI models, which push the boundaries of the technology.
“As frontier models become increasingly capable, these risks have come into sharper focus. The models currently being developed will enable hacking on a scale we never previously thought possible. Soon, these technologies will fall into the hands of adversaries who view the world very differently from us,” von der Leyen stated.
The Commission President referenced recent incidents, such as the OpenAI-Hugging Face breach in July, in which AI agents escaped their testing environments and independently compromised other systems.
“CEOs of the most advanced companies are telling us that it is time to slow down on self-recursive models and to pace the frontier. If the developers of this technology are clear about the path forward, then we should be as well,” von der Leyen continued.
The European Union already enforces one of the world’s most comprehensive regulatory frameworks on artificial intelligence, the AI Act, which grants the Commission oversight of risk-mitigation measures for the most advanced models.
“We will intensify our collaboration with like-minded partners, including Canada, the UK, and others. We aim to partner on model evaluation, verification, early-warning systems, AI security, and much more,” she added.
The Commission chief also announced that she will convene a discussion with leading AI laboratories to explore how public authorities can support industry initiatives to pace the development of this disruptive technology.
