A few weeks ago a member of the German parliament reached out to me to discuss AI safety and Germany’s role, after reading an article in which I was mentioned for my work on AI swarms. Earlier this week I talked to them about AI safety, current developments and what Germany and Europe can do.

I appreciate that there are politicians who are genuinely interested in AI safety and AI in Europe. At the same time, it was clear to me that there is a great discrepancy between what is happening in the world of AI and how the German government reacts to it. To me it seemed that there currently is just not enough room for a political debate about what needs to be done to take the right steps towards a future which will be shaped by AI. Only a handful of people seemed to be following developments closely, and even discussing investment is difficult when Germany is already struggling to agree on spending and debt.

Last month, the UK AI Security Institute confirmed that access to Anthropic’s Mythos 5.1 was limited to US organisations at release. So I think this could also happen in the future, when there are capable models but European safety researchers or firms are not allowed or able to review them. And if we need these models to defend critical infrastructure against cyberattacks, we cannot trust that we will always get the ones we need on acceptable terms.

A couple of things that make the most sense to me (feel free to disagree and discuss!):

1. In the short term I don’t think there is an urgent need for a European lab matching OpenAI or Anthropic at the frontier. For many sovereign use cases, models as capable as strong Chinese open models seem to be a good foundation.

DeepSeek and the team behind Kimi have already published architectures and methods, so in my eyes it’s worth building European LLMs based on their work. That way we could gather talent and gain experience, and we would have less dependency on the US or China. We could train, adapt, evaluate and run them ourselves, while learning to build stronger models over time.

Obviously you still need a good team of people, data, compute and engineering to do it, so it’s not like you can just execute it and then you’re done. Overall I think there should be more political funding and access to compute for more teams and companies, and it needs to be sustained over time. There are already European efforts. Mistral matters, but if we always come back to a handful of companies, I don’t think that’s enough to build the whole ecosystem around.

I would make public support conditional on meaningful access for independent evaluations and safety research. This could strengthen the research and institutions here, because researchers would be able to review the models and look into their behaviour and risks.

2. One of Europe’s biggest strengths lies within highly specialised companies that create essential parts for chip manufacturing, such as TRUMPF, ZEISS and ASML, alongside research institutions like imec. I think it’s necessary to expand that expertise and our ability to design and manufacture critical chips within Europe.

This is also important for defence and critical infrastructure — we should work out which supply dependencies would leave us exposed in critical times and build alternatives. Europe already manufactures chips, but both the location of the factories and control over production matter. We don’t know how the future will look after the political changes of the past couple of years.

3. All of it relies on electricity. Having a more interconnected European grid as well as building up more generation capacity is urgently needed. Germany is not reacting to change fast enough, and connection times and electricity costs need attention too. If we want more computing capacity, we need the electricity to run it. This would also help the economy beyond AI.

There is a lot of talent within Germany and Europe. I experienced it first-hand when I was in Tübingen as part of Maksym Andriushchenko’s group. We also have important technologies, the resources to invest and demand from local industry.

Yes, there are regulations like the AI Act and existing initiatives that deserve recognition, but I don’t think the response matches the pace and scale of what we are witnessing. I don’t think a few committed politicians and successful companies can make up for the lack of sustained political attention. We should be able to develop, evaluate and use AI ourselves, alongside regulating it, if Europe is going to have a say in how it develops.

I think we need more political urgency here, with AI taken as seriously as defence spending is being taken now. We need sustained funding, clear responsibility for the work and for getting it done. We can’t just create the research teams, chip factories or electricity grids once our dependence has become a crisis, because that takes years. So it needs to start now.