EU AI Policy Day frames AI Act as enabler, not barrier, for startups

The AI Policy Day recap is a useful counterweight to the narrative that Europe has already ceded the AI race. Participants painted a picture of a continent with strong research, dense industrial clusters, and a fast-growing network of AI hubs—but struggling to translate those into breakout, globally scaled AI companies. Crucially, many founders and policymakers at the event framed the AI Act not as a brake, but as a way to create trust and legal certainty that could actually speed adoption.

If that framing sticks, Europe’s strategy looks less like overregulation and more like an attempt to differentiate on ‘trustworthy AI’ as a competitive asset. For AGI, Europe is unlikely to host the very first frontier lab that crosses a superintelligence threshold. But it could be the region that builds the most robust downstream ecosystem of regulated, safety-conscious applications—especially in sectors like healthcare, mobility, and public services. That would give European players bargaining power in global standards-setting and could meaningfully shape how frontier models are deployed, even if they’re trained elsewhere.