Von der Leyen: Europe needn't build frontier AI itself

The line came from Ursula von der Leyen herself: "We do not need to be the ones who develop the frontier technology to be the ones who draw the greatest value from it." That is a notable softening from the European Commission president's 2025 messaging on AI independence, and Tech Policy Press collected the immediate pushback from Brussels policy circles. Two of the researchers we track in our directory circulated the piece within hours.

In her State of the Union address, von der Leyen called on Europe to "pace the frontier" and invited leading US AI labs to discuss risks from advanced models. "CEOs of the most advanced companies tell us that it is time to slow down on the self-recursive models," she said.

Risto Uuk, head of European policy at the Future of Life Institute, described her tone as "unusually direct about risks from advanced general-purpose AI models, including cyber capabilities, autonomous agents and self-improving systems." He pushed for "clear red lines, independent evaluation of the most powerful systems, and a credible answer to what Europe will do if a system cannot be shown to remain under meaningful human control."

Others were less convinced. "I'm not thrilled with the AI part of the speech, hearing Amodei's 'pace the frontier' rhetoric being copied almost wholesale," said Cori Crider of the Future of Tech Institute. Europe, she added, "simultaneously know we need our own infrastructure and behave as if we have to advance through Big Tech rather than building towards strategic resilience."

On the industrial side, Margarida Silva of the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations pointed to the much-delayed Cloud and AI Development Act, which "seeks to increase demand for sovereign cloud services while also trying to triple compute capacity within the EU." Von der Leyen also flagged the EU's goods trade deficit with China, which had reached around €1 billion a day in 2025, and warned of a "second China shock."

Giorgos Verdi of Open Markets Institute Europe put the gap plainly: "while the framing has changed, the EU hasn't managed to effectively reduce its dependencies on the ground." A separate EU Kids Act would bar under-13s from social media, add supervised access for older minors, and extend to AI chatbots.