The European Union and the Emergence of Artificial Intelligence in a Time of Geopolitical Rivalry

This paper establishes how the European Union (EU) is responding to the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a fragmenting Liberal International Order (LIO). AI technologies are developing quickly and moving up the international agenda as AI goes from mere theoretical possibility to a registry of power and the cutting edge of geopolitical competition. In that context, the EU response to AI is closely related to how it manages its international relations today, namely with the United States and China, and how it imagines the future, the EU’s place in it and how to safeguard EU values. The paper therefore addresses the policy and political debates that the emergence of AI has provoked at the EU level as well as globally, employing the framework of reference for this panel’s book to analyse the degree to which AI is being approached from a Nationalist, Atlanticist or Europeanist perspective. It sheds light on EU actor positions in a fast moving, fluid and often contradictory space that is growing quickly in terms of technological applications and corresponding political ideas.