According to the draft, Brussels wants to “strengthen EU AI sovereignty” by accelerating the development and use of European-made AI solutions, with an emphasis on scalable, replicable generative AI for public administrations. The strategy highlights priority sectors including healthcare, defence, and manufacturing, positioning AI as a core capability for the EU’s industrial base.

The document flags “external dependencies of the AI stack”; in other words: the compute, infrastructure, and software layers underpinning AI, as a security risk that could be exploited by state and non-state actors. This reflects wider European concerns over supply chains and digital sovereignty, particularly as global competition intensifies.

To implement the plan, the Commission is mobilising €1 billion from existing EU programmes to support adoption efforts, especially in sectors like manufacturing and health. Public administrations are assigned a central role in market-shaping: by procuring and deploying European, often open-source, AI tools, governments are expected to help homegrown start-ups grow.

The EU intends to prioritise AI-enabled tools in defence, including accelerating development and deployment of European command-and-control (C2) capabilities. Today, many European militaries rely heavily on US-provided systems through NATO; Brussels wants to shift toward sovereign options and even support “frontier” AI models for space-defence applications.

Even as Europe nurtures promising AI firms: from France’s Mistral to Germany’s Helsing, the bloc still depends on the US and Asia for key software, hardware, and critical minerals. Political dynamics also loom large: concerns about over-reliance on American tech have intensified, while China’s rapid AI advances raise fears that Europe could be sidelined in setting the rules and capabilities of the next wave.