An EU Approach to Regulating Technologies in the Race for Strategic Technological Autonomy

In the current shifting geopolitical context, characterized by competition for strategic materials and technologies, the EU adopts a unique strategy of focusing its regulatory frameworks for key enabling technologies on a value centred approach and by building the narrative for trustworthy focused technology regulations, thus adopting a soft diplomacy approach in its ambitions to reach Open Strategic Autonomy. While previous research and policy papers have analysed in detail the importance of trustworthiness and put forward evaluation frameworks in relation to the regulation of key enabling technologies such as is the case of AI, the present paper takes a novel approach and demonstrate how focusing on trustworthiness represents a narrative construction used in a diplomatic manner to reach broader geopolitical objectives in the global race for technological supremacy and strategic autonomy. The paper goes to show that EU's approach to regulating technologies is unique, as it constructs a narrative of technology centred around values that in fact serves the purpose of reaching strategic autonomy. By doing so, it focuses its discourse on promotion rather than protection measures, in a soft-power approach to de-risking. The article makes this case by analysing a key piece of legislation on regulating novel technology-namely the EU Artificial Intelligence Act.