European Union leaders are meeting in Dublin on Friday for the first summit devoted entirely to artificial intelligence, as the bloc tries to work out how to compete with the United States and China without losing control of the technology.

The informal European Council meeting at the Convention Centre Dublin follows Thursday’s wider European Political Community summit, which brought around 50 European leaders to the Irish capital. European Council President António Costa put AI on the agenda in a letter to leaders on 3 November, saying the aim was to establish a common approach. “This will be the leaders’ first in-depth discussion of this crucial issue,” a European official said.

Competitiveness first, then trust

The discussion is split in two. The first part focuses on competitiveness: how to stimulate public and private investment, where Europe sits in the AI value chain, and how to put the EU back at the forefront of innovation. To feed into that debate, leaders are hearing from Arthur Mensch, chief executive of Mistral AI, the French start-up taking on American tech giants in large language models.

“Europe has solid foundations, but we still lag behind in some areas,” a European official acknowledged ahead of the meeting. Costa has framed the discussion around sovereignty, asking how Europe can become a leading participant across the AI value chain, from computing power and cloud infrastructure to chips and models.

The second part turns to governance, safety and trust, introduced by Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian researcher known as a godfather of AI and winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is expected to brief leaders on AI’s effects on employment, fundamental rights and the integrity of democratic processes. On that front, the EU intends to point to its lead in regulation. “Europe has a framework. We are the only region in the world to have one,” the same European official said.

No binding decisions expected

Because the meeting is informal, leaders are not expected to adopt binding decisions. The format is designed to let them speak more openly and set the direction of the bloc’s AI policy, with a press conference by Costa, Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen scheduled for 16:15 local time. Costa has already indicated leaders will return to AI in 2027, including at a retreat in Alden Biesen.

The AI agenda has been partly overshadowed by the question of who should represent Europe in US-brokered peace talks on Ukraine, after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Europe to choose a single representative by the end of November. Agence Europe reported that several member states asked for Ukraine to be discussed again on Friday, and US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were in Dublin to brief leaders after talks in Abu Dhabi and Moscow.

For Ireland, the back-to-back summits are the largest diplomatic gathering in the country’s history, with more than 5,000 police officers deployed across Dublin and the city centre under a major security lockdown.

Sources: Agence Europe, Demócrata, Nexus Europa.