EU Leaders Talk AI in Dublin; Drones Hunt Humans in Ukraine

Kaja Kallas didn't have to reach far for her example. Speaking at the first-ever AI summit of EU leaders in Dublin on Friday, the bloc's foreign policy chief pointed to the battlefield in Ukraine, "where you have drones equipped by artificial intelligence to really train to find anybody to kill." She called it the "dark side of AI." Then the heads of state went to lunch.

The informal European Council gathering, held at Dublin's Convention Center, was billed as the first the leaders have ever devoted to artificial intelligence. The stated aim: strike a balance between catching up with the US and China and protecting citizens from the technology's risks. The guest list tells you who gets a seat at that table. Arthur Mensch, CEO of French AI firm Mistral. Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as a "godfather" of AI, who joined the leaders over lunch to discuss safety, security risks, and "how to protect rights and jobs." No workers were reported on the guest list. No one from the communities that data centres and surveillance systems get built on top of.

Who Gets the Microphone

Mensch's pitch was blunt. "Europe has all the technology and the talent to lead the AI race. What it needs is speed, financing and a strong coordination between member states," he said, urging leaders to "act now." In remarks Mistral shared with POLITICO, he complained that "€260 billion a year currently paid to foreign providers could be reinvested here, on infrastructure we control and finance European R&D." When US CEOs including OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei made calls this year to slow AI development, Mistral urged Europe to steam ahead. A private company, invited to brief heads of state, lobbying for public financing and faster coordination. The pitch to the people running the continent was to hurry up and pay.

Metsola, the European Parliament President, said she was tired of hearing the EU had "somehow lost the AI race," cited "world class talent," and said ideas need financing. Estonia's Prime Minister Kristen Michal offered the same logic from another angle: "We should not make the same mistake. We should invest in new technologies." The word race came up again and again. Nobody asked who's running it, or who's being run over.

Sovereignty, Brussels-Style

Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin said leaders would explore "the balance between regulation and innovation, tech sovereignty how Europe can interact with developments in AI across the world." The talks are part of the bloc's effort to reduce its reliance on foreign technology and services. Sovereignty here means the Brussels apparatus and national capitals owning the stack, not the people subject to it.

European Council President Antonio Costa called AI "the most important technology of our time" and promised "higher productivity to better public services," plus "safe, human-centric AI." Estonia and Finland, in a letter, called for "EU-level arrangements for responding to serious AI incidents." The Centre for European Reform's James Green summed up the mood with an "all-of-the-above strategy." Invest, regulate, coordinate, compete. All of the above, except the question of who decides.

The Agenda Underneath

POLITICO reported the AI talks were overtaken by news of the day. The Nvidia scandal wasn't officially on the agenda, an EU official told AFP, though leaders might discuss its security ramifications. DW noted the summit followed a series of incidents involving rogue AI agents in recent months. Hinton and Yoshua Bengio had warned of AI's threats in the months after ChatGPT's release four years ago. The incidents arrived anyway, and the response is a lunch.

Kallas named drones that hunt people. Costa named productivity. Both sat in the same room, under the same flag, and the leaders' stated worry list ran from competitiveness to safety standards to the "race." Whether anyone at the table proposed stopping the drones, the summit coverage doesn't say.