ValgrAI forum brings global AI ethics and neurotech leaders to Spain

On its face, VSCF 2026 is another regional AI conference, but the speaker list and themes are a useful barometer of what serious people in the field think matters post‑DeepSeek and post‑GPT‑5. ValgrAI is putting ethics researcher Virginia Dignum, Sony’s Hiroaki Kitano and neurotechnology pioneer José María Azorín on the same stage, explicitly linking questions of responsible AI, scientific discovery and brain–machine interfaces. That combination reflects a growing belief that the road to more general intelligence will run through tightly coupled human–machine systems, not just bigger text models.([eldiario.es](https://www.eldiario.es/comunitat-valenciana/valgrai-reune-lideres-mundiales-inteligencia-artificial-vscf-2026_1_13322853.html))

For Europe, the forum is also about soft power. With the EU AI Act now in force, Brussels is trying to anchor itself as the place where safety, rights and industrial strategy for AI are debated together. High‑profile gatherings in Valencia that foreground ethics and practical deployments help counter the narrative that serious AI work only happens in San Francisco, Beijing or Seattle. Over time, the networks forged at events like VSCF can shape where PhD talent migrates, which startups get spun out of labs, and how much of the AGI value chain Europe actually captures.