Inside Europe's lessons on AI safety as U.S. rules loom

Europe and the United Kingdom are fine-tuning their approach to AI model testing as a deadline looms for the U.S. government to set rules of the road.

Why it matters: U.S. allies for years have been grappling with the same AI safety questions the Trump administration now faces.

• Wherever the U.S. lands in its AI framework, architects of the EU and U.K. approaches say it would be just the start.

The big picture: President Trump began his second term by scrapping his predecessor's AI strategy and pursuing an anti-regulatory regime.

• But as AI models became increasingly powerful fast, the Trump administration has found itself developing an oversight framework and deciding exactly what should be covered.
• Under Trump's executive order, the administration is due to release its voluntary AI framework by Aug. 1.
• The Trump administration is weighing a unified pitch from OpenAI and Anthropic to create "an equal playing field" where highly capable models are all covered, regardless of whether they're open- or closed-source, according to one source familiar with the discussions.

The EU, meanwhile, has treated AI safety as a sustained technical and policy project for several years.

• It's a fluid approach to cybersecurity use cases where previous events inform future rules.

Zoom in: One lesson from Europe is to start with specific threat scenarios.

• Researchers begin with historical data on threats such as biological weapons, then measure how much AI increases a bad actor's capabilities and whether that creates a systemic risk to society, CEO and co-founder of AI evaluation firm EquiStamp Chris Canal told Axios.
• Other key lessons from the EU process include tying benchmarking — testing AI models against standardized evaluations to measure their capabilities and risks — to specific scenarios, such as bioweapons or government database hacks.
• The EU also emphasizes multiple, independent verifications rather than relying solely on companies' own assessments.
• Canal worked with the EU and U.K. governments to shape their approaches to AI regulation.

Zoom out: The EU commits to getting buy-in from the scientific community, grounding AI risk thresholds in peer-reviewed science before embedding them into policy and pushing researchers to publish their methodologies.

• By comparison, the U.S. relies mainly on internal or industry-driven standards.
• Technical experts are also flocking to the private sector, particularly in the U.S. and U.K.

What they're saying: "There have been several times where we're working with someone on the [U.K.] government side, and they suddenly put in their two weeks' notice, maybe less, and then they have a great position at OpenAI," Canal said.

The bottom line: Governments are beginning to coalesce around cyber risks, but the U.S. and its allies are only beginning to map AI's broader challenges.