During a plenary debate on Tuesday 16 June on “achieving Europe’s digital sovereignty and resilience in the light of recent developments affecting access to advanced artificial intelligence technologies”, the main political groups in the European Parliament warned that the US government’s decision to restrict use of advanced artificial intelligence models by Anthropic, Mythos and Fable only to US citizens amounted to a “wake-up call” (see EUROPE 13888/14). This incident, they stressed, highlights the need for the European Union to invest in its own technological sovereignty.
Ana Miguel Pedro (EPP, Portuguese) welcomed the European Commission’s legislative package on technological sovereignty (see EUROPE 13880/1), aimed at reducing Europe’s external dependencies in strategic sectors such as cloud, artificial intelligence and semiconductors. In her view, “Europe learned, during the recent energy crisis, about the risks linked to dependency and cannot repeat the same mistakes with AI”, insisting that: “It is not enough to say that artificial intelligence must be regulated; we must also develop it, master it and protect it”.
For his part, Alex Agius Saliba (S&D, Maltese) described the US decision concerning Anthropic as a “turning point”, warning that: “A switch allowing a technology to be deactivated is no longer merely a theoretical risk; it is a reality”. “If Europe wants to be sovereign, it must control its own infrastructures”, he added. The S&D group also argued in favour of introducing a tax on digital giants that could generate up to €5 billion in revenue per year and help promote Europe’s technological sovereignty.
On behalf of the Patriots for Europe group, Ernő Schaller-Baross (Hungarian) called for investment: “We clearly lack resources and we need millions, even billions, of euros to finance new projects”, he said, while Diego Solier (ECR, Spanish) stressed the need to “create the conditions enabling companies to invest, innovate and grow in Europe”.
“Technology is a matter of power... We know that Donald Trump wants to dominate us”, warned Helmut Brandstätter (Renew Europe, Austrian). In his view, “only a genuine European capital market will allow large companies to emerge”. His colleague Michał Kobosko (Renew Europe, Polish) said that the US decision concerning Anthropic was “not an accident”, but a demonstration of the militarisation of technology.
Virginijus Sinkevičius (Greens/EFA, Lithuanian) said that cutting access to Anthropic models should serve as “a final warning for Europe to wake up”: “If we want sovereignty, we must be ready to finance it, organise it and defend it”. He also underlined the need for additional investment and greater recourse to public procurement in order to help European solutions first and foremost to reach critical mass.
Fernando Barrena Arza (The Left, Spanish) criticised a package which, in his view, “mainly supports a market-driven expansion of data centres and artificial intelligence infrastructures”, at the risk either of increasing fragmentation between Member States or of replacing dependencies on third countries such as China or the United States with dependence on European oligopolies.
“Sovereignty depends on innovative and robust companies, fair competition, technological openness and the States’ capacity to act, not on bureaucracy and planning from Brussels”, said Siegbert Frank Droese (German), on behalf of the Europe of Sovereign Nations group.
Upcoming action plan to address cybersecurity threats linked to new advanced AI models. The US decision concerning Anthropic was “a textbook case”, according to European Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, who stressed the need to ensure that “no one has any kind of ‘kill switch’ mechanism over our critical technologies”. She announced an upcoming action plan to address cybersecurity threats linked to new advanced AI models.
Lastly, Ms Virkkunen said that the technological sovereignty package would require up to €450 billion in investment over the next 10 years and announced a consultation with Member States and the European Investment Bank (EIB) on the possible creation of a “European equity capacity” aimed at bridging the significant equity and high-risk financing gap from which Europe’s tech sector suffers compared with the United States. In her view, such an initiative could amount to a real “paradigm shift”. (Original version in French by Ana Pisonero Hernández)