BRUSSELS — The European Union is under pressure to keep Ukrainian troops fully online after Elon Musk’s Starlink was restricted amid volatile U.S. support for Kyiv.

“It was a very dangerous and unpleasant surprise,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters after EU leaders met in Brussels, referring to Starlink speed limitations experienced by military troops in recent days. “We were using Starlink to intercept jet-powered Shaheds [combat drones] that are attacking our civilian infrastructure and killing our families … When the speed limits were lowered, we became incapable of shooting [them] down.”

Ukraine has long relied critically on Musk’s satellite constellation for wartime efforts. Reuters reported Friday that the order to slow Ukraine’s military-grade Starshield service came from the White House, days after Washington pressed Kyiv to halt strikes on Russian refineries, amid soaring energy prices and ahead of November’s midterm elections.

“It is unacceptable for Ukraine’s defense — and therefore Europe’s security — to depend on the goodwill of a single American billionaire or on Donald Trump’s decisions,” French centrist Member of the European Parliament Christophe Grudler told POLITICO.

Ahead of Thursday’s high-level meeting, European lawmakers had been calling on the EU executive to fast-track Kyiv’s access to satellite capabilities already pooled under the bloc’s Govsatcom program — which gives participating governments secure communications capabilities.

Negotiations between the EU executive and Ukraine over this access have been ongoing since March, with no breakthrough. Norway and Iceland secured such an agreement earlier this year.

“What I don’t understand is why the European Commission and the Member States have not done everything possible to quickly reach an agreement that would allow Ukraine to benefit from it,” added Christophe Grudler, who wrote to EU leaders.

He also called on them to speed up work on IRIS² — the EU’s in-house, planned satellite network and full-fledged match to Starlink, which is only expected to come online in 2030.

Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier confirmed in a statement that it is “currently in talks with Ukraine to fully associate” the country with the EU’s Govsatcom program. “The war in Ukraine shows that our security also depends on space. And the EU has been doing quite a lot. We are ready to support Ukraine where we can support Ukraine,” he added.

Calls to crack down on dependence on foreign providers and boost alternatives to Starlink also come at a time when legislators are negotiating a series of laws that could tame Musk’s ambitions in Europe.

“Ukraine’s dependence on Starlink highlights the vulnerability of European defence systems that rely on U.S. technology, Another reminder that Europe must reduce its dangerous technological dependencies — ASAP,” center-right Finnish lawmaker Aura Salla said on social media.

Policymakers across Europe have been joining forces to curb Starlink’s dominance in low-Earth orbit, where satellites fly close to Earth to deliver faster connections.

“As legislators, we must ensure that European operators are well positioned in the market and limit the dominance of foreign players,” German center-left lawmaker Matthias Ecke said. In Brussels, lawmakers, including Ecke, are backing European telcos gunning for prized satellite frequencies, currently licensed to U.S. operators until next year and eyed by Starlink.

Meanwhile, Zelenskyy said Ukraine was working bilaterally with EU countries to secure more capabilities, citing France. He also expressed hopes that Starlink restrictions could be lifted. “My partners told me there were signals from the White House that they would return these capabilities.”

SpaceX — Starlink’s parent company — didn’t respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.

BRUSSELS — EU parliamentarians are digging in on calls to revive an artificial intelligence liability law after receiving support from an unexpected ally: Open AI’s Sam Altman.

“If something goes wrong with our models during training, there’s gonna be some version of that we need to be responsible for,” Altman said in an exclusive interview with Decoded by POLITICO released Monday. “There’s gonna need to be a liability framework for companies.”

This spotlight on liability has given influential members of the European Parliament a told-you-so moment after the EU last year scrapped plans to legislate on responsibility and compensation for harms caused by AI makers and agents.

The proposal by the European Commission for an AI liability law was killed amid a deep effort in Brussels to deregulate and reduce the legislative burden on companies — with the Commission arguing at the time that the proposal had little chance of securing sufficient political support.

German conservative lawmaker Axel Voss, who led on the proposal for the European Parliament, wants Brussels to put liability back on the agenda in light of Altman’s comments.

“I welcome this overdue moment of honesty. For years, the tech industry has argued that liability would stifle innovation,” he said. “Now even the CEO of OpenAI admits: Without liability, there is no trust.”

The law, first proposed in 2022, “would have closed exactly the gap Altman is now describing: responsibility before deployment, during training and testing,” Voss said.

One way governments could reduce AI risks is to apply product liability law, assigning responsibility (and penalties) to the makers of the most advanced AI models to nudge their development toward a safety-first approach.

As concerns over the pace of frontier AI development and the harm caused make the question of liability impossible to ignore — and as proposals for AI liability rules gain support around the world — proponents say the EU’s decision to scrap the proposal hasn’t aged well.

The Commission has defended its landmark AI Act in response to mounting incidents and fears, while leaving the door open to additional rules addressing liability.

In response to questions by POLITICO last week, the EU’s tech chief Henna Virkkunen said she would look into potential “loopholes” in the current legislation, while reiterating the need to be “very careful” when crafting new rules.

The Commission didn’t respond to POLITICO’s request to comment for this article.

Not too late?

Social democrat lawmaker Brando Benifei, who helped write the EU’s AI rulebook, on Tuesday called the withdrawal of the liability proposal “a serious mistake,” saying obligations emerging from the AI Act were originally meant to be complemented by the rules to hold the companies liable.

“Frontier models and high-risk systems need strict liability,” he said.

Together with Irish independent lawmaker Michael McNamara and Greens member Kim van Sparrentak, the senior lawmakers are actively calling on the EU to introduce an AI liability act “to fill the legislative gaps currently existing for these kinds of incidents, so no people or European businesses are left empty-handed against these big providers when they cause harm,” POLITICO previously reported.

“We have an AI Act that regulates use, but we have no clear rules on who pays when a foundation model itself is flawed, biased or causes harm. This is not tenable,” Voss said.

He said it’s not too late for Brussels to take another U-turn. “If the builder of a model admits he should be liable, the legislator should not be less ambitious than the industry.”

But one senior Parliament official involved in the liability law proposal said that for the Commission, “it would be admitting they made a big mistake.”

“If there is a major AI accident, creating more and more momentum for [action], they will probably call it differently — maybe an ‘Agentic AI Act,’ or ‘Protecting our Citizens from AI Act’ or whatever in order to hide past mistakes and flawed observations,” the official said.

As Brussels considers how to address new risks, the rest of the world will be watching.

“Altman says there will need to be a liability framework for models like his, but most likely one with many exceptions,” said Artur Bogucki, director of research at the think tank CEPS.

“The EU needs a direct, targeted AI liability instrument, narrow and procedural at its core,” including obligations to log and disclose evidence, he said.

Eliza Gkritsi contributed to this report.