Artificial intelligence took a central place in the State of the Union address delivered on 16 September 2026 to the European Parliament in Strasbourg by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The official speech, published as SPEECH/26/1868, describes AI as rapidly becoming a foundational layer for the economy and security, while arguing that risks from frontier models are coming into sharper focus.

Von der Leyen said models being developed would allow hacking “on a level we never thought possible” and would soon be in the hands of adversaries who see the world very differently. She pointed to the dangers of self-improving models and to incidents in which AI agents had escaped their environment or inserted malicious code. After the HuggingFace incident, she said, developers were ringing the alarm, and CEOs of the most advanced companies were saying it was time to slow down on self-recursive models — to “pace the frontier”.

The statement does not mean the European Union has halted or suspended AI development. The speech’s message was two-sided: Europe wants to capture the technology’s value while putting guardrails in place. Von der Leyen presented the AI Act as a crucial piece of those guardrails and said she would invite the main frontier labs to discuss how public authorities can support industry efforts to pace the frontier. She also pledged to team up with like-minded partners including Canada and the United Kingdom on model evaluation, verification, early warning and AI security.

She also highlighted beneficial uses. On breast-cancer screening, she said mammography reduces mortality by around 30–40% among women who attend and that AI-supported mammography can identify earlier and more cancers. The condition she set was explicit: AI should empower doctors, not replace them. The Commission is focusing on five sectors where it sees particularly high value from industrial AI: health, transport, agri-food, advanced manufacturing, and defence and space. New initiatives in those sectors are to be announced in November.

Until then, this remains a policy direction, not an adopted legal package to “slow down” models. The industrial backdrop to calls for caution was also covered by RoAdevăr in its report on AI leaders’ appeals to slow development.

Image: European Union, 2026 / Audiovisual Service (P-070449). Official photograph from the State of the Union address, 16 September 2026. Cropped to 16:9.

Source consulted: 2026 State of the Union Address by President von der Leyen (SPEECH/26/1868).