OPINION
Published17 Sept. 2026
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Some movie trailers are really good at creating anticipation, others give the feeling that you have seen the whole movie. This week leading up to Ursula von der Leyen’s 16 Sept. State of the Union speech as president of the European Commission felt like the latter. But please, keep on reading.
Von der Leyen has a lot at stake. Perhaps more than ever before, the Commission needs to convince that Europe can hold its grounds as a geopolitical power and as a uniting project to its people. “We are now dealing with an openly hostile world,” she commented, indicating the gravity of the moment.
On issues close to the IAPP community, the trailer ruined the surprise a bit. First, there was no doubt that von der Leyen was going to double down on her current agenda of competitiveness and value-based digital order. She did so across a range of policy areas, perhaps more assertively on artificial intelligence.
“The second tipping point of our times is AI” and that justifies the EU stepping up to address current frontier models’ security concerns, she said. Model evaluation, verification, early warming, model security are all on the Commission’s radar for global cooperation “with our like-minded partners like Canada, the United Kingdom and others.”
Beyond frontier models, von der Leyen wants to bring AI down to the “factory floor,” with promises to massively boost Europe’s computing capacity and investment in AI startups, as well as to support AI adoption in five high-value sectors: health, transport, agrifood, advanced manufacturing and defense and space, with measures to be announced in November.
All this largely aligns with the strategy the Commission has been rolling out for the past year, pinned in its AI Continent Strategy.
She was more cagy about simplification. She reiterated the importance of this endeavor to cut administrative costs for European companies but didn’t point to deliverables. How could she when much of the Commission’s efforts in that space are underdelivering, if not failing.
Perhaps the most anticipated announcement came with the EU KIDS Act, officially proposed the day after the State of the Union to address children’s use and exposure to social media services deemed problematic. It would prohibit social media accounts for children under age 13, following similar bans implemented or in motion across Europe — not to mention beyond — and builds on a steady stream of initiatives tackling children’s online safety issues of various natures.
“Reversing the burden of proof” is the key phrase I retain from her speech from a governance perspective.
Two questions come to mind: what criteria should the law use to define the “social media” category to identify — only — problematic services? Some services like music streaming are already concerned that they may be caught by too wide a definition when they are not the target audience.
And will the law command a zero-risk environment and if not, what risk would be acceptable? The negotiations ahead, mixed up with Digital Fairness Act elements about addictive design, risk being quite complex.
Beyond the points linked to digital responsibility, perhaps what stayed with me as I listened to the State of the Union address, was how frontally von der Leyen addressed open aggressions from Russia against Ukraine and against the integrity and security of European Union member states. She went as far as calling for a European security council and for a security protocol akin to Article 4 of the NATO treaty for common consultation.
There were lots of dubious looks from members of Parliament about these ideas. However, they are an incredibly important signal of tectonic shifts of global powers.
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