EU Tech Chief Says AI Act Ready to Tackle Rogue AI Risk

The European Union's AI Act is fully equipped to address the risks posed by rogue AI agents, according to EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen. Speaking to Reuters on Friday, Virkkunen pushed back against critics who claim the bloc's AI rules are outdated, emphasizing that the regulation covers the entire lifecycle of advanced AI models. "We see that the safety and security of very capable models is a very hot topic internationally and we in Europe are well equipped for that," she said.

The EU's AI Act, adopted two years ago and widely regarded as one of the world's strictest AI regulations, classifies systems based on their level of risk. Virkkunen noted that EU regulators are actively providing guidance to companies on how to evaluate their models, incorporating recommendations from a panel of 60 AI experts. In late August, the European Commission requested information from more than 30 unnamed AI companies regarding their safety and security protocols, and Virkkunen confirmed she is now assessing those responses.

The comments come amid heightened global concern over AI safety following recent incidents at OpenAI and Anthropic. On September 13, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in a blog post that the pace of AI development is moving too quickly and could "outrun our ability to understand and control these systems." He attributed the blistering advance to recursive self-improvement—AI's growing capacity to engineer the next generation of models autonomously.

Virkkunen dismissed suggestions that Europe needs to follow industry calls for an AI slowdown, asserting that the bloc's existing regulatory framework is already sufficient to manage emerging threats. Her stance positions the EU as a regulatory outlier, continuing to back its risk-based approach even as frontier AI labs warn of capabilities approaching unmanageable thresholds.