Von der Leyen’s ‘European values,’ paid for by private equity, powered by Claude

We’re now living in an “openly hostile world”, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told MEPs in her State of the Union speech. “Old relationships have frayed”, war rages on the continent, European industries face pressure from “global competitors”, while “ultranationalists, anti-Europeans and Russian interference” share, she said, one goal: “to shatter European unity”. She cast the challenge to “European values” as a “battle of narratives”. For Europe to maintain its “power to act” on the global stage, she said, its “fate must remain in the hands of Europeans”. What that means in practice became clearest when she turned to artificial intelligence. Frontier AI models are being developed by a handful of American labs, with Chinese companies not far behind. Europe’s AI champion, Mistral, isn’t in the same ballpark and relies on models made by US company Anthropic. But Europe does not necessarily need to develop its own frontier models to “draw the greatest value from it”, von der Leyen said. Drawing value? Instead, Europe and "like-minded countries" such as the UK and Canada could marshal their combined regulatory power to limit the harms from these technologies. And befitting European values, she said, the EU would focus its AI efforts on how artificial intelligence can create value in the “real economy,” on the factory floor and in the hospital ward. She pointed to breast cancer screening. Early screening has been shown to reduce mortality by 30 to 40 percent, she said, suggesting that AI could help doctors reach far more women, rather than replace them. “I do not want a robot to tell me whether I have cancer or not,” she said. “Above all, we want AI with human agency,” which, she said, was the “essence of the European way”. What is also the European way, it appears, is its reliance on foreign private actors to achieve domestic policy goals.