Changes from report parliamentary committee draft to plenary report

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a general-purpose capability that changes how trade is organised, how firms compete, and how economic power is exercised. It affects goods, services, and data-dependent business models simultaneously, developing in a geopolitical context where technology leadership, access to critical inputs, and rule-setting are increasingly contested. For the EU, AI is therefore not only a question of digital policy but a trade policy question, because the conditions for AI deployment, market access, and cross-border operations will shape Europe’s competitiveness and strategic autonomy.

This report argues for an integrated approach bringing together AI in trade (deployment for competitiveness and enforcement) and trade of AI (open strategic autonomy over critical inputs and rules-based international cooperation), so that Europe can compete globally while safeguarding its social model.

AI IN TRADE: COMPETITIVENESS THROUGH DEPLOYMENT AND PREDICTABILITY

AI adoption is fundamental to EU export competitiveness and trade facilitation. The technology reduces information asymmetries, lowers market-entry costs, and improves compliance predictability, enabling smaller firms to access opportunities previously reserved for large operators with dedicated compliance teams. For small and medium enterprises central to the EU’s industrial base and export potential, AI-powered advisory services for navigating tariffs, rules of origin, and regulatory requirements across multiple markets can substantially reduce the disproportionate costs they face from regulatory complexity and fragmented procedures.

AI deployment by customs authorities can help address critical enforcement challenges at scale. Rising cross-border volumes, faster transaction cycles, and increasingly data-driven commerce create capacity constraints that traditional administrative approaches cannot manage. AI-enabled risk analysis, pattern detection, and supply chain optimisation can strengthen the EU’s ability to ensure fair competition and effective enforcement of agreed rules, sustaining confidence that compliance is rewarded rather than circumvented. This enforcement capacity is inseparable from the EU’s commitment to open and fair markets.

Furthermore, AI is fundamentally altering services trade through increased tradability of tasks and accelerated cross-border delivery, intensifying competition in areas where Europe has historically been strong. This transformation requires the EU to support widespread adoption, investment, and scale-up so that European firms compete globally from a position of strength. Trade agreements and partnerships should promote inclusive AI governance frameworks that enable European service providers to benefit from productivity gains while addressing labour market transitions. The EU’s external engagement must ensure that AI-driven productivity gains translate into broadly shared prosperity and that regulatory cooperation prevents fragmentation from becoming a structural barrier to digital trade and services exports.

TRADE OF AI: OPEN STRATEGIC AUTONOMY THROUGH RESILIENT INPUTS AND RULES-BASED GOVERNANCE

As AI becomes embedded in trade, Europe’s competitiveness will not only depend on deployment, but on access to critical upstream inputs that make AI possible. These inputs, notably advanced semiconductors, frontier compute and cloud infrastructure, are concentrated in very few hands and are increasingly shaped by geopolitical rivalry, export controls and industrial policy. When access to chips, equipment or cloud services can be restricted, conditioned or disrupted, dependency becomes leverage, and leverage becomes a trade risk for European firms and public administrations.

The report therefore argues for open strategic autonomy as a practical trade and economic security strategy. The objective is not autarky, but derisking through diversification with trusted partners, targeted capacity-building in Europe, and coherent use of the EU’s economic security toolbox to deter coercion and manage shocks without undermining legal certainty for operators. This is about keeping Europe open, but less exposed, and ensuring that trade and investment relations support, rather than constrain, Europe’s ability to compete in AI-enabled sectors.

Resilience must be matched by rule-shaping. In a context of accelerating competition and fragmented governance, Europe should project its human-centric, risk-based approach, anchored in the first horizontal AI framework of its kind, through partnerships with like-minded partners, including via Trade and Technology Councils, Digital Partnerships and international standardisation, to facilitate convergence on trustworthy AI.

Finally, the WTO remains essential to prevent digital fragmentation from hardening into new trade barriers, notably through balanced digital trade and data rules that advance ‘data flows with trust’, protect regulatory autonomy, and preserve predictable cross-border conditions that are essential for AI development and deployment. Without credible multilateral guardrails, regulatory fragmentation and data restrictions risk becoming the next generation of trade barriers, particularly for AI-enabled services, undermining predictability for businesses and weakening the rules-based system the EU depends on.

The EU stands at a crossroads. One path leads toward permanent technological dependence, where European firms consume AI developed elsewhere, operate on infrastructure controlled externally, and adjust regulations to accommodate foreign standards. The alternative path, pursued in this report, demands simultaneous action across trade facilitation, sectoral adoption, supply chain resilience, and international rule-making. It requires mobilising investment at unprecedented scale, embedding worker protections and development cooperation in trade policy, diversifying semiconductor and compute supply, and projecting Europe’s governance framework through partnerships that value trustworthy AI.

This comprehensive strategy reflects a fundamental conviction: Europe can achieve AI-enabled competitiveness without sacrificing the social model and fundamental rights protections that define its identity. Trade policy becomes the mechanism through which these objectives converge, facilitating the deployment that drives productivity, securing the inputs that enable autonomy, and shaping the rules that make trustworthy AI the global standard. The question is not whether Europe will participate in the AI-driven transformation of international trade, but whether it will do so on its own terms or on conditions set by others.