Von der Leyen calls for pacing frontier AI in the State of the Union
The European Commission president echoed the labs' own calls to slow self-recursive models, and said she would invite the main frontier labs to discuss how to pace development.
- Government & policy
- Safety & alignment
- Notable
In her 2026 State of the Union address in Strasbourg, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen took up frontier AI’s risks directly, singling out the hacking capabilities of advanced models and self-improving systems, and echoing the calls that lab leaders had made days earlier to slow the pace of development:
CEOs of the most advanced companies tell us that it is time to slow down on the self-recursive models. To pace the frontier.
She added that “if the people developing the technology are clear, then we should be too”, and announced she would “invite the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier”. The language tracked closely with Dario Amodei’s essay of the same week, which Sam Altman and Elon Musk had publicly endorsed — making a European head of institution one of the first to fold the labs’ own pacing argument into official policy remarks.
Von der Leyen paired the safety framing with the bloc’s regulatory line, calling the EU AI Act “a crucial piece to putting guardrails in place”, and set AI in a wider sovereignty and alliance agenda: an “Alliance for the Future” with Canada, and a call for human-centred deployment in areas such as medicine, where she said AI should “empower our doctors, not replace them”. The speech committed no timetable or mechanism, but signalled that the Commission intended to engage the frontier labs on pacing rather than leave the question to the companies.