European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Monday pitched using artificial intelligence to streamline administrative procedures for European businesses as part of a broader push to simplify commerce and boost the EU’s competitiveness.
Speaking at a behind-closed-doors meeting of the European People’s Party in Taormina, Sicily, on Oct. 12, von der Leyen said the Commission would introduce an “only once” approach to business reporting. This would let companies submit information once, with AI helping public administrations use the data.
Von der Leyen argued that European companies repeatedly have to report the same information to public authorities, wasting time that businesses — and Europe — cannot afford, according to a copy of her speech seen by POLITICO.
“And this is why we will introduce ‘Only Once’, to report data only once – and with the help of AI the administration will ensure efficient use,” she said.
The speech marks the first time von der Leyen has explicitly pitched using AI specifically to reduce businesses’ administrative workload.
The “only once” principle itself is not new. The Commission already included it in its EU Inc. proposal presented in March 2026, which aims to create a harmonized corporate framework allowing companies to establish and operate businesses more easily across the bloc.
Under the EU Inc. proposal, companies could submit information once through an EU-level digital interface, with relevant data automatically transmitted between authorities. However, the proposal does not specifically envisage using AI to carry out that process.
Von der Leyen did not provide details on how the AI-supported system would operate, whether it would apply to all businesses or when the Commission intends to introduce it.
In her speech, the Commission president also encouraged governments to get on board with simplification efforts by signing a pact not to add extra requirements when transposing EU-mandated legislation into national regulations.
The central principle, von der Leyen wrote in a letter to EU leaders sent Oct. 12, is that “a rule agreed at European level cannot become more complex when transposed or implemented nationally.”
Under the proposed pact, capitals would have to identify and justify additional national requirements that go beyond EU legislation, including assessing their impact on businesses and the single market.
In the 1987 Nintendo game “Zelda II: The Adventure of Link,” there is a village you can visit and a home you can enter and a man in a purple shirt you can speak with. But the only thing he says is “I am Error.” I was unexpectedly delighted by this dialogue when I first encountered it on a Gamecube emulator in 2009 (I’m not that old). It felt both meta and existential, or just an amusing bug. It turned out that Error was actually the character’s name, a sort of in-joke slash translation mistake that has since become a meme akin to “Your princess is in another castle” or “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this” from the original “Legend of Zelda.”
Error is a non-player character (NPC), meaning one that the player can’t control but is usually more than just video game wallpaper. Nearly 40 years later, NPCs have come a long way, with increasingly complex behaviors and conversational dialogue that span far more than just three words. The upcoming game “Grand Theft Auto VI” is rumored to feature unprecedented complex NPCs with rich, fleshed-out personalities and backstories, while video game companies explore using artificial intelligence to let players train NPCs as they interact.
In many ways, NPCs are how many people were first introduced to AI, although in a relatively simplistic form compared to the chatbots and massive data center hogs that we have come to either love or loathe, with little room in between. Years ago, NPCs became an insult spun out of 4Chan, the anonymous online forum, to describe real people who don’t think for themselves and follow a set of cultural programming, usually illustrated by an expressionless gray cartoon avatar. The meme became popularized by chronically online cohorts of Donald Trump supporters during his first presidential term, adjacent to the idea of “Trump derangement syndrome,” both implying that people oppose the MAGA movement out of reflexive mindlessness and not, you know, because they’d looked under the hood and seen it for what it is.
It might just sound like a new way to call someone an idiot, but the NPC label has much deeper, scarier implications. On the surface, it seems like harmless video game humor, and I’m sure we’ve all had encounters with actual humans that resembled interacting with tautological machines programmed with limited responses. “There is weather today. Did you hear about celebrity? Sports.” And certainly social media, now overrun by bots, increasingly feels as if every conversation is between different viruses. These realities don’t map to every experience yet following the NPC slander to its logical conclusion can be dangerous: declaring that a person’s alleged lack of inner thinking is justification for dismissing their humanity. After all, they’re just mindless characters in a video game (and maybe reality is just The Matrix, so whatever), so it’s fine to ignore them, disenfranchise them or abandon them to a grim fate.
Solipsism, the philosophical position that you can only experience your own consciousness, and therefore other people might not exist or have souls, is not a new idea. René Descartes believed animals were soulless, unthinking automatons, though modern neuroscience has repeatedly disproven that one. (On some level, “I am Error” echoes Descartes’ famous quip about thinking and therefore am-ing.) But now that complex AI has spilled from video games into the mainstream, it’s especially dangerous to see the NPC label has become embedded in mainstream politics, whether explicitly or not.
All this is rooted in Donald Trump’s recent campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” via executive order, posting on social media Thursday that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” The idea has quickly been embraced by tech leaders, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk saying this week that AI is “no more” and promising to change the name of his AI company, SpaceXAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to SpaceXSI. More recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared his approval in a Wednesday interview with Fox News. “I do like SI, because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring,” Bezos said. “Artificial sort of means fake.”
Yeah, most of us are going to roll our eyes hard at AI being “super,” but if these attempts at normalization gain ground and get pushed to their absurd conclusion, it might end in providing AI more rights than humans. (It’s worth noting Musk invokes the NPC meme often.) It’s right there in the name: “Super intelligence” is better than the old, human kind, so why shouldn’t we give these computer programs rights and defend them from regulation? That’s why stories about AI bots being put into virtual torture chambers aren’t just silly, but foregrounds the false notion that AI is capable of suffering. (Maybe don’t put bots in rooms like that anyway — at the very least, it’s a waste of energy.)
After all, AI will either become the savior of humanity or make humans obsolete, depending on what day of the week it is. Sure, this technology is nifty, even as it comes with an enormous environmental destruction. But we are still a long way from elevating the technology above regular human intelligence. But as in a two-for-one, if you can be sold on the myth that AI is superhuman, it travels along with the idea that regular humans are disposable. In other words, the tech bros are trying to turn us all into NPCs, into Errors, not least through the mass surveillance programs being used to hunt migrants and spy on protesters.
Yes, thankfully, granting above-human rights to supposedly sentient AI sentience is still a fringe idea, but we can see that changing before our eyes, not to mention we already kind of did that with corporations. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told POLITICO that the “world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” To further consolidate its power — or at least keep the economy from crashing — Silicon Valley wants us to believe their latest technological invention can think, reason and moralize. It’s no surprise that tech bros were recently exposed trying to convince none other than the pope that AI is conscious, but to his credit, Leo XIV has rejected this idea, saying “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity” and elsewhere warning against “losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines.’”
Spending time with large language models like ChatGPT and knowing a little about how they work, it becomes clear that it’s just a really good computer program that can mirror human expression, sometimes terribly and sometimes surprisingly well. There remains zero hard evidence that AI algorithms are sentient.
Yet an increasing number of people are convinced otherwise, as seen in the controversial AI psychosis phenomenon, which makes me wonder how so many people have persuaded themselves a souped-up version of “I am Error” is a conscious being. It can feel like human interaction typing back and forth with these things, but there are always gaps where you can sense the uncanny valley, where you know it’s just a lot of math and nothing more. Perhaps, if you want to be really cynical about it, you could boil down all of human nature and biology and the emergence of consciousness into “a lot of math” as well. But our brains aren’t computers and physics has yet to fully explain consciousness — that’s why they call it a hard problem. Instead of stewing in this mystery, tech bros have gotten the metaphor backward, assigning personhood to bots while denying it to living humans. Talk about soulless.
European organizations have to reckon with how to keep up with the modern world without sacrificing sovereignty. Geopolitical instability, tightening regulatory expectations and the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) mean that, for many organizations, sovereignty now sits alongside resilience and business continuity in board-level risk discussions. The question they can no longer defer is how to harness the opportunities of the modern cloud without surrendering control over their own data. Answering it requires honesty about what sovereignty means, and about where it can actually be found.
A definition Europe can trust
The European Commission’s forthcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) is the right vehicle for that honesty: giving Europe a shared, enforceable definition of what “sovereign” actually means. Without such a definition, the market is filled with commercial offerings that claim the sovereignty label without delivering the substance, a practice described as “sovereignty washing.” This gap has led some organizations to treat open source as the answer. But open source software is a licensing model, not an operating model, and it doesn’t settle questions about infrastructure or jurisdiction or even reliability and access. It’s not a route out of dependency, it’s a different dependency on project sponsors and code maintainers. A definition gives policymakers a way to properly assess claims of sovereignty against a consistent standard rather than taking marketing at face value.
Europe should not wait for CADA to take effect before acting, though. European cloud service providers (CSPs) have been partnering with established technology providers to deliver real sovereign capability, without rebuilding the entire technology stack from scratch.
The best time to plant the sovereign tree was 10 years ago
If Europe wants to grow its industrial base, it has to support the ecosystem as it is now, not as it may in 10 years’ time. CADA’s own roadmap assumes roughly five to seven years to triple the EU’s data-center capacity. Providers who have already built capacity by blending EU capabilities with proven non-EU technologies would have to spend the intervening years relinquishing their growth. It is scale, not a shortage of skills or innovation, that is the biggest practical obstacle facing a stronger European cloud market. This is precisely why partnership with proven technology sources deserves a central place in the sovereignty debate rather than being treated as a second-best option.
Partnership shortens that timeline considerably, letting European CSPs deliver sovereign, scaled services now instead of waiting for domestic capacity to catch up organically. In Italy, IPZS, owned by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, is using this model to build a modern Digital Application Platform for the Italian EUDI wallet, a foundational EU digital identity initiative. It provides a live example of that model working in Europe today, at the scale and speed the policy window demands.
It is through scale that the local industrial base can deliver sovereign capabilities, compete, capture market share, and invest in developing and integrating home-grown technologies. Hoping for the alternative to happen, that is for a European technological stack to fully emerge and be adopted, is the equivalent of putting the cart before the horse.
The rules need to allow for a model that’s already working
Providers, such as evoila, are now operating well beyond Europe’s borders, alongside Uniserver. This shows the model working at a broader scale, combining local operational and jurisdictional control with proven technology. Sovereignty spans jurisdictional, technological, operational and supply-chain dimensions, and a partnership model can address all four while drawing on technology already proven at scale, rather than asking every layer to be rebuilt from first principles by a single European provider.
Alongside its cloud platform, developed in-house and operated from data centers in Europe under EU jurisdiction, IONOS also offers customers a dedicated VMware-based private cloud. It is also operated within the EU and designed to provide European data sovereignty and operational control.
Broadcom’s role in that model is deliberately narrow. It supplies the VMware cloud software layer to the CSP, while the CSP itself runs the infrastructure and holds the customer relationship, so that no European customer data passes through Broadcom or is subject to its access. Trust, in this model, follows the architecture rather than the brand. If CADA’s tiers implicitly assume that sovereignty can only be delivered by a fully European-built stack, CADA would shut out precisely the route that is already allowing Europe to scale fastest: partnership between local operators and proven technology providers.
The path forward
Europe does not have to choose between moving quickly and building sovereignty. The two are compatible, provided the legislation is calibrated to recognize it. As the European Parliament and European Council work on CADA, the priority should be for it to recognize and reward the partnership models already delivering sovereign capability across Europe today.
The above column is sponsor-generated content.
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The political advertisement is linked to Broadcom’s software business and advocacy around the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA).
BRUSSELS — The EU’s idea of getting social media influencers to cover leaders’ summits has not gone according to plan, as no content creators have been invited to this week’s European Council.
Earlier this year, POLITICO reported that the Council had suggested influencers be invited to EU leaders’ summits in Brussels as well as certain ministerial meetings in a bid to “reach new audiences to inform about Council activities.” The influencers were to be chosen and invited by the EU countries, rather than by the Council.
However, six EU diplomats told POLITICO’s EU Influence newsletter that their countries hadn’t put forward any names for the European Council on Oct. 15 and 16.
Why? Seems they just haven’t got around to it. “Mainly logistical problems and budget constraints,” said one of the diplomats, who was granted anonymity to speak freely, as were others quoted in this piece. Another said they’d not had a chance to discuss it with their capital, but hadn’t ruled out the idea for future summits.
“There is no appetite for this,” said a third diplomat. “If my leader wants an influencer [they] would take one” with them, the diplomat said, adding that countries “don’t need the Council for that.”
Council spokesperson Romain Sadet confirmed that “we won’t be having content creators at the upcoming European Council.”
When the plan was unveiled, a Council official said the influencers would be granted access to areas of the Council’s Brussels HQ that are currently open only to journalists accredited by the EU institutions — though they would be banned from asking ministers and leaders questions.
“Content creators will be accompanied at all times and will not be treated as media,” the Council official continued. “We are working on the basis of about 10 content creators per event max, accompanied by Council staff.”
In June, the Council sent guidance for choosing influencers to national governments, seen by POLITICO.
It is up to member countries to decide which YouTubers and TikTokers should attend, but the Council’s guidance says they should not pick anyone who has “published views against EU values.”
The content creators should also not have any “significant or long-standing commercial collaborations” to avoid associations with large brands, the guidance continues.
The idea has not gone down well with many journalists.
“Clicks, views and impressions are great on TikTok and Instagram. But the basic fact remains: influencers in press conferences and at summits will not have to disclose who pays them,” the International Press Association, which represents reporters covering European institutions, said in a statement at the time. “By contrast, EU-accredited journalists are not expected to accept payment in return for writing nice stories. It’s sort of called journalistic ethics.”
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