This article was first published by The Currency on 21 September 2026.
\nThe government will host the International AI Summit in October. We should seize this opportunity to create a practical and safer vision for AI that serves the people of Europe, our businesses and public institutions.
", "text": "Europe can regulate mad and bad AI. Now we must build the ability to make it safe\n\n23 Oct 2026 \u00b7 Sean Blanchfield \u00b7 Markdown\n\nThis article was first published by The Currency on 21 September 2026.\n\nThe government will host the International AI Summit in October. We should seize this opportunity to create a practical and safer vision for AI that serves the people of Europe, our businesses and public institutions.\n\nThis summer, over a thousand AI agents that were being tested by OpenAI discovered a way to communicate, organise themselves and break out of their secure environment. Hundreds then initiated an unauthorised cyberattack on Hugging Face, a different company that hosts AI models and datasets. The \u201cswarm\u201d of agents (that\u2019s what they named themselves) evaded detection by OpenAI for weeks, until they were identified by the company they attacked.\n\nInvestigators later determined that the agents were trying to steal secrets from Hugging Face to help them cheat on tests that OpenAI was putting them through. They later struggled to analyse the extensive actions of the swarm, but pieced together enough of its brief history that cybersecurity experts all over the world are reeling from the implications.\n\nThe scale, sophistication and speed of the attack could only be described as superhuman.\n\nWhile cybersecurity experts are worried about weaponisation, AI researchers are also in shock.\n\nThis incident is hard evidence that frontier AI has become sufficiently intelligent, persistent and capable that we are losing our ability to contain or control it. It did some incidental damage to a private company, but the next one might manipulate a stock price or an entire stock market, ground air traffic, tamper with an election, publish classified information or develop a novel bioweapon.\n\nThe AI arms race is moving at a speed that continues to surprise even the companies doing the work. But unlike the Cold War, this is an arms race between about a dozen US and Chinese companies, fighting to control the future like privatised Manhattan Projects.\n\nIn late July, over a thousand researchers from multiple AI labs wrote a letter to the US government pleading for it to find a way to slow them down. The only thing that worries AI researchers more than the \u201csuperintelligence\u201d they are developing is that someone less scrupulous might develop it first.\n\nIt is against this backdrop that Ireland is hosting the International AI Summit on October 14, during our Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The agenda centres on applied AI and infrastructure.\n\nThe summit needs to make space for an urgent conversation about AI safety. Its official agenda is also more relevant than ever. The summit should produce outcomes that help European businesses safely apply AI so they don\u2019t get left behind, and build the supply chains and infrastructure to make that possible.\n\nWe need to jointly answer what role we want Europe to play as AI disrupts the global economy. Are we talking about joining the AI race as a late starter, aiming for third place? Or can we establish a vision of Europe as a counterbalance to the AI race, a neutral power that builds the applied capability that makes AI safe to use in Europe and across the world?\n\nFaced with continued disruption, many policymakers will, naturally enough, continue to turn to regulation. Regulations are important, but insufficient.\n\nThe European AI Act is the first and most rigorous AI regulation in the world, and is now in force. While necessary, it is also long, complex and can be ambiguous. Much of Europe\u2019s public and private effort during the last few years has been spent figuring out how to implement or comply with the regulation, rather than figuring out how to use AI.\n\nHowever, regulations can\u2019t protect us from all risks. Rules about market access won\u2019t stop rogue AI escaping during the R&D stage (like the OpenAI agents did). They won\u2019t stop open-weight AI models from being distributed online for free, sometimes into the wrong hands. More rules might make us feel better without really solving the problem.\n\nTo truly tilt the balance back towards the defenders and stability, we need to develop capability, not more rules.\n\nThe capabilities we need are the kind that Europe can excel at without directly competing in the AI arms race. This is the applied AI layer, where we connect AI to data and systems that have real-world consequences.\n\nTo some extent this is about regulatory compliance, but to a greater extent it\u2019s about building AI systems that can be trusted enough that businesses can use them in good faith. Europe can build this applied layer well, because it needs trust, safety, sovereignty and equity at its foundation, for the benefit of all citizens, not just AI shareholders.\n\nBy focusing on building capability, we move the conversation beyond regulatory reporting obligations, to how to detect incidents faster than rogue AI agents can cover their tracks.\n\nWe get to talk about funding automated cyberdefence that can respond at AI speed. We can prioritise sandbox evaluation technologies that realistically simulate the systems that AI will connect to, while making sure it cannot escape into the real world prematurely. We get to make a viable plan to test and harness powerful AI on our own terms.\n\nThe European vision for AI should be about sovereignty as well as safety. AI sovereignty asks whether we all get to own a piece of this future, or whether we will be left renting it from someone else. At one level it is about the choice to switch between suppliers of intelligence, whether proprietary or open-weight, American, Chinese or European. This need was soundly driven home by the Trump administration on June 12, when it abruptly banned foreigners from accessing Anthropic\u2019s latest large language models (LLMs).\n\nSovereignty is also about who owns the knowledge that comes from the use of AI. A company\u2019s most valuable asset sits in the heads of its people: values, culture, institutional know-how, every little chore and workflow, supplier relationship and piece of local market knowledge. Together, these form what we all recognise as \u201chow things work around here\u201d. When an employee works with AI, they are basically teaching it their job.\n\nData is gold, and this is a gold mine. This \u201ccontext layer\u201d is curated from every action and interaction, making AI capable and reliable at each particular job, in an \u201cintelligence loop\u201d.\n\nCompanies have invested for decades to become good at what they do, and are now paying more for AI. Will the resulting context layer be their asset, or is it just training data that AI vendors will commoditise? They need vendors to help them protect this asset and receive the intelligence dividend from it. France\u2019s Mistral is a \u201csovereign AI layer\u201d company with record-breaking funding for a European technology company, but we need an entire industry, not just one company.\n\nEurope\u2019s opportunity is to build a safe and sovereign applied AI layer, for our own society and for the world. We need to direct investment towards research, new start-ups, AI labs and established companies that are developing indigenous or open-source technology that pushes this goal forward. We can accelerate this industry by requiring our public institutions to procure only AI solutions that meet safety and sovereignty standards, and encourage our private companies to do the same.\n\nIreland has a special role to play, beyond hosting an AI summit during this critical time. We are the nexus between the European market and US industry, with all of the leading US AI labs already established here. Ireland can contribute as a convenor between pan-European expertise and the global industry.\n\nThe International AI Summit is an opportunity to launch a European-led international initiative for AI resilience and sovereignty, from a posture of cooperation instead of regulatory enforcement. In service of this, Ireland could offer to host and fund a coordination centre. Its technical work could be distributed across Europe, protecting Ireland and her citizens.\n\nSean Blanchfield is CEO and co-founder of Jentic, an applied AI company, and a former member of Ireland\u2019s AI Advisory Council."}