Europe’s AI wake-up call: cybersecurity threats, sovereignty fears, and a growing demand for ROI dominated VivaTech

Welcome to Eye on AI. Beatrice Nolan here. In today’s issue:

All the news from Paris’ VivaTech conference.

The stream of researchers leaving Google DeepMind continues.

The defeat of New York Congressional candidate Alex Bores—and what it means.

OpenAI and Broadcom unveil new AI chip.

I spent last week in Paris for VivaTech, Europe’s largest startup and tech conference, which managed to draw 180,000 attendees, despite a record heatwave in France.

VivaTech’s biggest headliner, Jeff Bezos, was in techno-optimist mode, arguing that AI will create a labour shortage rather than mass redundancy. He paired that with his longer-term vision of moving heavy industry off Earth and building a permanent industrial presence on the Moon.

Executive Chairman of AMI Labs and former head of Meta’s AI efforts, Yann LeCun, was happy to provide a counterpoint, taking the time to tell CNBC that the AI industry could be heading for a “big bubble explosion” if companies fail to bring costs down fast enough.

The winner of the most memorable moment, however, goes to two humanoid robots. While attempting to perform a choreographed demo at a booth, the pair slowly drifted backward into a row of televisions and sent two of the screens crashing to the floor—a counter to some of the hype on display in the exhibition hall.

The more grounded conversations elsewhere at the conference revolved around immediate realities: who controls AI, how to counter some of the current risks, and what Europe, still reeling from the shock of being cut off from Anthropic’s Mythos model, needs to do to control it’s access to AI.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the event was preoccupied by one of the more imminent risks posed by AI: cybersecurity. The debut of Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 Cyber has fueled anxiety among both business and government leaders due to their advanced hacking abilities.

These models can now, at speed and scale, do what once required time and specialized human knowledge: find unknown vulnerabilities in critical software and generate working exploits. The worry is that the same capability lands in the hands of criminal groups and nation-state actors before most organizations have had time to shore up their defenses.

Anthropic and OpenAI have both staggered the release of recent cyber products and models with the aim of giving defenders a head start—granting initial access only to vetted security firms and critical infrastructure operators so they can patch their systems before the capabilities spread more widely.

But there is some concern about what happens if that window—the period when defenders have access to better AI models than attackers—closes too quickly

“I think long term it favors defenders,” Peter DeSantis, SVP at Amazon, said in an interview. “But the concern is short term.”

At the moment, he warned, security teams are still scrambling to understand the new kinds of attacks these models enable and to update their practices and tooling, potentially creating a gap between how quickly AI can be used offensively and how quickly defenses are adapting.

Earlier this week, OpenAI expanded its Daybreak initiative, pairing GPT-5.5-Cyber with a new open-source patching effort called Patch the Planet to work with firms including Cloudflare, Cisco, and CrowdStrike with the aim of helping organizations find and fix vulnerabilities.

A few days prior, Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI’s head of core platforms, told me the idea behind the staggered roll-outs was........

© Fortune