Mission Letters: Digital policy

The Commission wants to further strengthen cybersecurity, catch up in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing, stimulate investment in digital infrastructures, make EU data policy more coherent and improve the protection of citizens in the digital environment. cep digital expert Anja Hoffmann makes it clear that the EU must, above all, eliminate legal ambiguities if it wants to promote data exchange. "It must also promote the legally compliant anonymisation and use of synthetic data, resolve conflicts with the most important data protection principles and enable an innovation-friendly approach to the General Data Protection Regulation," says Hoffmann. In the field of AI, privileged access to supercomputers for selected start-ups could lead to market distortions. The main criticism is that public funding for AI projects in the EU lags far behind that of China or the USA. "The future of European AI does not lie in European champions, a few supercomputers and centralised planning, but in unleashing its entrepreneurial energies," says cep digital expert Anselm Küsters.