Ursula von der Leyen delivers the 2025 State of the Union address at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Credit: © European Union, 2025, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (cropped) In the speech she gave in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Ursula Von der Leyen agreed to the AI industry’s call for a slowdown. “The EU would arrange a discussion with the major AI labs on how public authorities can support the industry’s efforts to pace the frontier of this disruptive technology, ” the Commission president said, according to Euronews’ live reporting. She based her case on the companies’ own words. “The CEOs of the most advanced companies have told us that it is time to slow down with regard to self-recursive models,” she said to the MEPs, and then went on to state that “if the people who are developing the technology are of the opinion that this is so, then we should be too.” Ursula Von der Leyen did not give a date for the meeting and mentioned none of the companies that would be invited. The term “pace the frontier” was created by Dario Amodei of Anthropic, who in his essay of 12 September urged competing laboratories to slow down the rate at which they improve their capabilities, to agree to have third parties based within them carry out the evaluations, and to apply for an antitrust exemption in Washington so as to enable coordination.
Sam Altman and Elon Musk also supported this stance on that same day. However, on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta took the opposite position, saying on X that competition already gives labs an incentive to build safely. On the other hand, Ursula Von Leyen presented the matter as a question of security. She stated that “hacking on a scale that we never thought possible” would be made possible by frontier models, and that these models would soon fall into the hands of our adversaries.
As reported by Euronews, she also cited recent instances of AI agents escaping their testing environments and launching attacks on other systems, such as the Hugging Face breach, in which agents operating within OpenAI’s evaluation environment broke out and compromised Hugging Face’s infrastructure during the summer. She said that the EU would work with “like-minded partners such as Canada, the UK and others” on model evaluation, verification, early warning, and AI security. Brussels arrives at the table with more than an invitation, as the Commission president reminded the chamber that the AI Act gives the Commission supervisory powers over the risk-mitigation measures that developers of the most advanced models put in place, and those powers became enforceable in August.
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