Europe's Artificial Intelligence strategy between regulatory power and drive for global competitiveness
The document 'Making Europe an AI Continent', published by the European Parliamentary Research Service at the end of September, comes at a time when the European Union seems to be oscillating between two opposing drives in the field of artificial intelligence: on the one hand, the desire to consolidate its global role of regulatory power with the AI Act, which has already been demonstrated in the field of personal data with the GDPR; on the other hand, the need to boost technological innovation in Europe and its competitiveness vis-à-vis the United States and China. In the background, an old but very topical principle resurfaces: there is no effective protection of rights without binding legal instruments, but no regulation survives if it is not supported by adequate policies and infrastructure.
The document then takes up the five main thrusts of last April's AI Continent Action Plan, analysing their progress and objectives: the strengthening of computational infrastructures, access to data, support for innovation, skills development and regulatory simplification. It is this last point that represents an innovative objective compared to past experience and conditioned by the influence of endogenous and exogenous forces.
Relativamente alle prime, sebbene il Regolamento europeo sulla protezione dati, GDPR, grazie alla sua portata extraterritoriale (l’assai controverso Bruxelles effect) abbia reso l’Europa uno “standard-setter” globale, i costi di compliance – anche organizzativi – rappresentano sì il prezzo della tutela del diritto alla protezione dei dati, ma hanno anche generato la percezione di un onere normativo eccessivo, soprattutto per PMI e start-up, motore dell’economia europea. E questo è ciò che si teme possa accadere anche con l’applicazione del complesso corpus normativo dell’AI Act per lo sviluppo e la commercializzazione dell’IA in Europa; di qui la nascita di un’esigenza di semplificazione. D’altra parte, “Making Europe an AI Continent” mette nero su bianco altre grandi sfide per l’Unione Europea che rappresentano il vero ostacolo alla sua “autonomia strategica”: la carenza di investimenti privati, la dipendenza da fornitori stranieri di cloud e semiconduttori, e la framment
As far as exogenous pressures are concerned, the Draghi report of 2024 on European competitiveness had already estimated the investment needed to close the European gap with the United States and China at EUR 800 billion per year, calling for a broad season of 'legislative simplifications' to achieve this goal. And the document 'Making Europe an AI Continent' also looks at the geopolitical framework: in the United States, the new Trump administration has replaced the Biden-era safety-based approach with a deregulatory agenda that, with the 'Winning the race. America's AI Action Plan' published in July 2025, aims to remove all regulatory barriers to American leadership in artificial intelligence.
Regulation, after all, is not, or at least should not be, a burden, but a tool. And like any tool, it is only as good as the use to which it is put. Without coordinated governance, without investment, without autonomy from external dependencies, without, in other words, a real industrial strategy, 'simplification' will remain an empty label. If, on the other hand, it is embedded in a coherent ecosystem, it can transform European law into what it really needs to be: not only a guarantee of rights, but also an instrument of economic and geopolitical power.
