EU AI-policy: Between Geo-economic Pragmatism and Ambitions of Sovereignty

CEMES ANNUAL KEYNOTE with professor Daniel Mügge, University of Amsterdam.

Two opposing forces tug at EU AI policy. On the one hand, Brussels politicians paint EU dependence on US AI tech as a source of concern and vulnerability. Not least given America's volatile politics, Europe must stand on its own AI feet, so the thinking. On the other hand, the EU cannot afford to cut the umbilical cord to US-developed hardware and funding if it wants its firms to keep progressing. In this lecture, Daniel Mügge unravels the distinct threads that run through EU AI policy and options for the way forward. At the same time, he questions whether the terms of the "EU AI sovereignty vs transatlantic alliance"-debate do not miss something essential: a public debate about which AI future we want in the first place.

Daniel Mügge is Professor of Political Arithmetic at the University of Amsterdam. He currently investigates the European governance of artificial intelligence (AI). He leads the RegulAite project on "AI diplomacy", the EU's external relations in the AI field, and how those are shaped by global political and economic dynamics. Before his work on AI, he led the FickleFormulas team researching the politics of macroeconomic statistics. Daniel has been a lead editor of the Review of International Political Economy and a visiting scholar at Freie Universität Berlin, the London School of Economics, and Harvard University.