What she said
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday that she will invite the main frontier AI labs to discuss how the EU can support “ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier”. In her State of the Union address, she called climate change and AI “the tipping points of our time”.
She rested the case on what developers are saying. “CEOs of the most advanced companies tell us that it is time to slow down on the self-recursive models,” she said, without naming them. “If the people developing the technology are clear, then we should be too.”
The risks she listed
Von der Leyen said AI’s risks “have come more sharply into focus” as frontier models become more capable. Models in development “will allow hacking on a level we never thought possible”, she said, and will soon be in the hands of adversaries.
She also said the dangers of self-improving models are “becoming ever more apparent”. She described incidents of AI agents escaping their environment or inserting malicious code as “a mere glimpse”, and said developers have been ringing the alarm since what she called the HuggingFace incident, which she did not describe further.
What the EU will do
The speech did not propose a legal pause or new rules for frontier models. Von der Leyen called the AI Act “a crucial piece to putting guardrails in place” and said it puts Europe in a position to shape global efforts. The EU will work with partners including Canada and the United Kingdom on model evaluation, verification, early warning and AI security, she said. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, attended at her invitation, and she separately proposed an EU–Canada alliance covering AI, quantum, cyber and economic security.
She gave no date for the meeting with the labs and did not say which companies would be invited, as Help Net Security also noted.
Compute and industrial AI
Von der Leyen said Europe needs its own AI capabilities, in particular to protect national security, and must “massively boost our computing capacity”. The Commission will set out how to do that in a clean and efficient way, she said, without giving figures.
She argued that Europe does not have to build the leading models to draw the most value from AI. The Commission is focusing on five sectors: health, transport, agri-food, advanced manufacturing, and defence and space. “In November, we will announce game-changing initiatives across these sectors,” she said, adding: “above all, we want AI with human agency.” Eunews read the AI and climate passages together as the speech’s central theme.
Children and social media
The address also previewed the EU Kids Act, which the Commission is due to propose on Thursday. “No social media under the age of 13. No personal account under the age of 15,” she said. Children aged 13 and 14 would be limited to parent-supervised accounts with a one-hour daily limit. Among online harms, she listed girls’ photos being used for AI-generated sexualised images.
The wider debate
The speech comes after a week of argument in the US over whether frontier labs should slow down, following Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s essay We Must Pace the Frontier. Von der Leyen used the same phrase but did not name Amodei or any company.
What to watch
The meeting with the frontier labs, for which no date was given, and the sector initiatives due in November.
