Can Europe’s new AI safety regime tame US rogue agents — and Chinese ambitions?

BRUSSELS — The U.S.-China race for AI supremacy has suddenly given way to a race for AI safety. And in that race, until recently, the European Union has largely been running alone. It was the news last week of a first-ever case of an autonomous AI agent going rogue that sent U.S. lawmakers scurrying to submit a rash of new proposals in Congress to regulate artificial intelligence. Chinese President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has declared that Beijing is ready to lead the global effort on AI governance, with 29 countries signing on to a pact two weeks ago in Shanghai that was notably light on specifics. Europe instead has spent more than four years getting down to the nuts and bolts of how to regulate the ever-powerful technology. And now, the second anniversary of the EU’s landmark AI Act on Sunday is set to trigger sweeping new powers for the European Commission to police how top companies deal with the risks stemming from their most advanced AI models. Europe’s AI Office will have the power to demand that top frontier labs submit to evaluations and grant access to their models, risking major fines if they don’t comply. These regulatory capabilities arrive not a moment too soon after last week’s security incident, where an AI agent, driven by two OpenAI models, hacked into the American AI development platform Hugging Face. OpenAI said the security breach was “unprecedented.” Hugging Face co-founder Clement Delangue called it “mind-blowing.” The incident combines two related risks that experts have long warned about: losing control of a model, which then carries out a cyberattack. The U.S. response to the rogue agent included a bipartisan House bill dubbed the “AI Kill Switch Act” that requires companies to create the technical capacity to shut down, throttle or suspend their AI systems. As ever, the European Union is ahead of the game on technology regulation, with a far-reaching mechanism included in the bloc’s 2024 law to ensure AI companies monitor and prevent these types of risks. The growing fears that the models could go rogue with real-world consequences raise the stakes of the new enforcement regime, as safety advocates will look to the Commission to quickly make full use of its new powers. It’s also a reminder that the EU regulation will mostly be targeting non-European firms, with the American and Chinese industry leaders continuing to battle for development supremacy. AI, both technical advances and safety risks, will be on the agenda in September when U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping meet in Washington. Indeed, safety and development superiority are closely linked, since the models become more dangerous the farther they advance technically. Leading American firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic have been vying for superiority, but now face challenges from upstart “open-weight” models developed in China, like Moonshot’s Kimi K3 last week to much fanfare for both its capacity and low costs. Even if French firm Mistral tries to compete, Europe still lacks a viable industry-leading alternative of its own. But the EU legislation kicking in on August 2 may help shape how the world’s top AI models advance. Sergey Lagodinsky speaks at a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France on July 7, 2026. | Freddy Marvaux/EP “This is the moment the AI Act enters the geopolitical stage,” said German Greens MEP Sergey Lagodinsky, one of the Parliament’s key people monitoring the rollout of the law. Warning shot The initial drafting of the EU’s AI law actually began before ChatGPT stunned the world in November 2022. Still, the law foresees the rise of what it calls “general-purpose AI models,” which can perform a wide variety of tasks. Developers of such models, such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, should “assess and mitigate possible systemic risks,” the law says.