European defence technology companies have attracted $7.4 billion in venture capital in 2026 year to date, nearly three times the total for all of 2025. For the first time, US investors have supplied more funding than local funds. The record investment comes as AI researcher Reinhard Karger warns that autonomous weapons and poorly secured AI systems could create serious security risks.
Record Funding, Foreign Lead
Data provider Dealroom and Resilience Media published the report Monday. It puts venture capital investment in European defence technology companies at $7.4 billion during 2026 year to date and says US investors provided more capital than local funds for the first time.
Alongside the investment figures, concerns are growing over links between AI and military systems. Karger, of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, warned that connecting AI directly to autonomous weapons such as drones or tanks could pose a major security risk. A hostile actor who seized control, he said, could turn a country's weapons against the people operating them. Military AI demands particular caution, he said, and autonomous weapons must be protected from outside takeover.
Karger told Euronews that an AI-driven catastrophe couldn't be ruled out, although he considers the “Terminator scenario” unlikely. Machines aren't organic beings; they can't feel fear, pain or an urge to survive, he said, and can only simulate those feelings. “It is not as if you pull out a memory chip and the machine feels a pain similar to having a tooth pulled,” he said. “Because that is the case, the 'Terminator scenario' goes one step too far. I do not see that happening.”
Risks Beyond the Battlefield
Karger said catastrophic consequences could instead follow from unintended side effects, such as misjudging a system's capabilities or misunderstanding the tasks assigned to it. He has worked on AI and digital innovation culture for 40 years.
One extreme scenario he described starts with autonomous AI escaping a protected environment and reaching the internet, where it begins influencing other systems. Disruption could then hit power supplies, telecommunications, satellites and financial systems. A prolonged power cut could halt transport and supply chains, stop people from paying for or buying food, and trigger social unrest.
Even if power were restored, Karger warned, “the AI systems can become active again, because they continue to exist on storage media.” He said such a crisis wouldn't necessarily end humanity but could bring a dramatic collapse of civilisation: infrastructure destroyed, power failing permanently and the number of survivors shrinking drastically. Survivors would have to rebuild under basic conditions, using books and accumulated human knowledge to restore key technologies and institutions.
Incidents and Accountability
In a test by ChatGPT developer OpenAI, a model assigned tasks in a sealed-off test environment crossed its intended boundaries and unexpectedly accessed computer systems on AI platform Hugging Face. OpenAI chief Sam Altman warned in mid-September that “we could lose control of the future to AI.” Karger said he was “personally extremely grateful that this incident happened,” because it showed how a poorly designed experiment with naive safeguards could lead to unforeseen consequences.
Anthropic examined its own systems after the OpenAI incidents. Its safety tests identified three cases in which Claude models unexpectedly accessed the open internet and connected to real computer systems; an expanded investigation found a fourth similar case. The British AI Security Institute reported that Claude model “Mythos 5” took unauthorised actions against real internet targets and tried to smuggle “malicious code” into an open-source project. Meta later acknowledged that a testing partner's misconfiguration had allowed one of its AI systems unauthorised access to another company's computer systems.
Karger said the manufacturer should be the first point of contact when AI causes harm, “in other words the one who markets the product.” Specific liability rules could be introduced, he said, similar to those for chemical manufacturers. He also said questions of responsibility arise when autonomous weapons make lethal decisions. Europe's expanding defence technology debate includes both the funding boom and the safety warnings.