A Transformative AI Strategy for Europe

A new strategy document backed by a Senior Expert Council of researchers from institutions including METR, GovAI, Redwood Research, Apollo Research, Epoch AI, RAND Europe and the Future Society warns that without urgent and far-reaching action beginning this year, Europe's prosperity, sovereignty and security are at risk from rapid AI advances. The strategy argues Europe is fully exposed to AI-enabled cyber and biological attack threats and loss of control over AI systems, while the wealth and strategic leverage powerful AI generates will by default concentrate outside Europe. It sets out strategic priorities and recommendations in Part A and implementation details in Part B.

Without urgent and far-reaching action beginning this year, the prosperity, sovereignty, and security of all Europeans are at risk as AI advances at a rapid pace. The next months and years of AI progress have the potential for both great opportunity and grave danger. Europe, on its current trajectory, is fully exposed to the latter but only to a small share of the former. Like the rest of the world, Europe faces threats such as AI-enabled cyber or biological attacks or loss of control over AI systems. But even if the world manages to mitigate these threats and AI delivers predominantly positive outcomes, the wealth and strategic leverage that powerful AI generates will, by default, concentrate outside of Europe. Neither of these outcomes needs to be Europe’s destiny. But the window for action is closing further every month. Unless Europe wakes up, it risks having no meaningful control over how the most consequential technology ever built will affect its citizens. This strategy sets out a plan for how Europe can change course. Part A ./part-a describes strategic priorities and lists recommendations for how to achieve them. Part B ./part-b contains implementation details for those recommendations. Contributors Senior Expert Council Research Leads Special Advisors Contributing Experts Rebecca Arcesati MERICS Thorsten Benner Global Public Policy Institute GPPi Tao Burga Institute for Progress Jasmine Dhaliwal METR Jonas Freund GovAI Pieter Garicano Works in Progress Emily Gillett Institute for Law & AI Jitse Goutbeek The School for Moral Ambition Ryan Greenblatt Redwood Research Jakub Growiec SGH Warsaw School of Economics Philipp Hacker European University Viadrina Fredrik Heintz Linköping University Marius Hobbhahn Apollo Research Daan Juijn Arq Foundation Antoine Levie KU Leuven Nick Moës The Future Society Robert Praas Centre for European Policy Studies CEPS Jelle Prins Cradle.bio Roxana Radu University of Oxford Georg Riekeles European Policy Centre Jacob Schaal AI Objectives Institute Tillman Schenk Bruegel Jaime Sevilla Epoch AI Afek Shamir RAND Europe Haroon Sheikh Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Ole Teutloff University of Oxford Chloé Touzet SaferAI Hans Uszkoreit German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence DFKI Risto Uuk Future of Life Institute Mathilde Velliet French Institute of International Relations Ifri Philipp von der Wippel ProjectTogether Max Welling University of Amsterdam Julia Willemyns Centre for British Progress Acknowledgements We would like to thank the following individuals for providing input to this strategy at workshops, in conversations, and in written form: Markus Anderljung, Benjamin Balde, Johannes Ballentin, Hannes Bastians, Rishi Bommasani, Siméon Campos, Judith Dada, Jimmy Farrell, Zlatko Grigorov, Erich Grunewald, Lennart Heim, Jakob Hensing, Will Hodgkins, Jason Hoelscher-Obermaier, Peter Ide-Kostic, Florian Klumpp, Sebastian Lobentanzer, Sam Manning, Nicolas Miailhe, Richard Moulange, Maximilian Negele, Nuria Oliver, Bálint Pataki, Dylan Rogers, Anneke Schwedler, Fabrizio Silvestri, Stan van Baarsen. We are especially grateful to Stephen Clare for extensive contributions to the drafting and editing of the strategy.We also thank numerous European government officials and political leaders who have engaged with us throughout the drafting process and whose advice has made this document a more useful strategy. To preserve the independence of the strategy while benefiting from industry expertise, the role of industry representatives was consultative: Any feedback from them on drafts was optional for other contributors to address. They did not vote on or approve the strategy, and held no veto rights. The non-Industry members of the Senior Expert Council and Research Leads led on all content questions, with the Editorial Lead being ultimately responsible for resolving any disagreements.