As the industry debates whether AI is moving too fast, the EU’s tech chief is making the opposite argument: Brussels is ready. EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said Friday that Europe’s rules on AI use are more than capable of dealing with rogue agents, following incidents at OpenAI and Anthropic that have fed fears of models venturing beyond human control.
“We see that the safety and security of very capable models is a very hot topic internationally and we in Europe are well equipped for that,” Virkkunen told Reuters.
EU AI Act vs rogue AI: the Commission’s case
Virkkunen dismissed critics who call the bloc’s rules outdated. “We have our AI Act in place and the AI Act covers the whole life cycle of these models,” she said, adding that regulators are issuing guidance to companies on how to evaluate their models, incorporating recommendations from 60 AI experts.
The claims are not merely rhetorical. The European Commission requested information in late August from more than 30 AI companies, asking for details of their safety and security measures; Virkkunen said she is now assessing the responses. The AI Act, adopted two years ago, regulates by risk level and remains among the world’s strictest frameworks – a reputation that cuts both ways depending on who is asked.
Why the timing matters
The interview lands amid a genuine anxiety spiral. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in September that AI development is moving too fast and, left unchecked, may “outrun our ability to understand and control these systems” – a recursive self-improvement worry that has become the era’s favorite doomer talking point.
For crypto readers, the connection is practical rather than philosophical: AI agents now move value, sign transactions and audit contracts, so the rules governing their safety obligations are also, increasingly, rules governing parts of the stack Web3 depends on. Virkkunen’s message to skeptical builders is that guidance is available and the lifecycle approach is intentional – whether Brussels can enforce it at model-training speed is the open question the next wave of information requests will answer.
Source: Cointelegraph, October 10, 2026.
