EU governments to discuss global AI rules as Trump calls warnings a 'hoax'

Government officials from across the European Union will gather in Brussels on Thursday to discuss how to set global rules to counter the threat from new artificial intelligence (AI) models, according to two EU diplomats and a draft agenda seen by Politico Europe.

The meeting is a gathering of the Artificial Intelligence Board, which comprises representatives from every EU member country and regularly convenes to monitor progress on the bloc's Artificial Intelligence Act. According to the draft agenda, the European Commission will give "updates on EU and international AI policy" and a "technical briefing on recent AI incidents".

The gathering comes after a series of calls to slow down AI development from senior figures in the industry, among them Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman. U.S. President Donald Trump rebuffed those calls immediately, describing the AI safety warnings as a "hoax" and arguing that slowing down would hand China the momentum in AI.

Global cooperation on the agenda

The European discussions on global cooperation will focus on work done at the G7, the G20 and the United Nations, one of the diplomats said.

The European Commission's top tech official had already made the same case: Executive Vice President for Tech Sovereignty Henna Virkkunen called for global AI rules and cooperation last Friday. Virkkunen also pointed out that the EU has a law in place requiring companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to assess and mitigate the risk of losing control of an AI model, and that this is "not the case globally".

Parliament presses the Commission

The European Parliament's lead lawmaker on AI, Italian Social Democrat Brando Benifei, pressed the European Commission on Tuesday to push for global AI cooperation, including in President Ursula von der Leyen's State of the EU address to lawmakers on Wednesday.

"We need international cooperation, we need the U.S., we need China," Benifei said in an interview with Euronews.

Thursday's meeting puts those arguments in front of representatives of every EU member country, alongside the Commission's technical briefing on recent AI incidents, at a point when the calls for regulation are coming from inside the technology industry as well as from senior figures in the EU's own institutions.