Lessons from co-hosting a Roundtable on Reliable, Safe and Secure AI at the European Parliament

Apr 23
2 min read

Moonshots in Reliable, Safe and Secure AI can be the EU's competitive advantage

Authors: Alejandro Tlaie Boria & Jimmy Farrell

Executive Summary

Pour Demain and SaferAI brought together around 40 participants at the European Parliament on 23 March 2026 for a roundtable on Moonshots in Reliable, Safe & Secure (RSS) AI: A Path to European Leverage and Strategic AI Adoption. MEPs Michael McNamara (Renew Europe) and Sergey Lagodinsky (Greens/EFA) co-hosted the meeting under the Chatham House rule. The room included parliamentarians, EU officials, national government representatives, industry executives, investors, and researchers. Turing Prize winner Yoshua Bengio joined via video message.

The strategic case for RSS

While global investment is currently dominated by scaling frontier model infrastructure, these systems lack the formal guarantees required for high-stakes deployment. This gap is a critical bottleneck for the European economy:

Economic exposure: 48% of EU economic activity is concentrated in safety-critical sectors (e.g., aerospace, energy, transport, healthcare), compared to 26% in the US and 20% in China.
A reliability gap: Current AI models cannot provide the assurances required by established safety standards in industries like aviation or rail.
Leapfrog strategy: Participants agreed that Europe should not compete head-on with US/Chinese firms on brute-force scaling. Instead, the EU can lead by building verified system-level architectures that ensure safety even if the underlying AI model fails.

Key recommendations

The roundtable identified four pillars for a successful European RSS AI moonshot:

Shift to system-level safety: Focus research on formal verification and hardware-backed security rather than incremental model improvements.
Establish a European AI ARPA: Create a dedicated, mission-driven research institution built for speed and scientific risk-taking.
Targeted funding: Avoid the fragmentation of the European Competitiveness Fund. Prioritize RSS with initial investments in the tens of millions, scaling to billions for long-term human capital and compute infrastructure.
Public procurement: Use government purchasing power to validate the market for homegrown, trustworthy AI solutions.

The joint declaration

After the event, a joint declaration was signed by MEPs from major political groups (Renew, Greens/EFA, S&D), leading researchers like Yoshua Bengio, and industry representatives. The signatories call on the EU to:

Integrate RSS as a core priority within the Frontier AI Initiative (FAII) and the European Competitiveness Fund.
Commit to dedicated, multi-year funding of at least hundreds of millions of euros annually.

Europe has a unique window to define the global standard for deployable, trustworthy AI. The technical and political coalition for this agenda is now in place; the next step is translating this convergence into focused, institutional action.

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