At a glance: The EU is building a secure testing platform by end of 2026 to evaluate AI models and identify vulnerabilities in critical sectors such as finance, energy, and healthcare before they can be exploited.
The European Commission has adopted an action plan on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, whose cornerstone initiative is a secure AI testing platform for critical infrastructure. The platform is to be implemented by end of 2026 in cooperation with ENISA and JRC, and will test AI models for security risks in simulated environments.
The testing platform focuses on five critical sectors: finance, energy supply, healthcare, transport, and public administration. It is intended to enable organisations to validate AI models in controlled, simulated environments in order to identify technical vulnerabilities in hospitals, banks and power grids at an early stage, before they can be exploited by malicious actors.
The Commission justifies the action plan by reference to the changing threat landscape: AI systems accelerate the discovery of security gaps and enable attackers to conduct cyberattacks in an automated and large-scale manner. Since most leading AI models are developed by American technology companies, the EU is pursuing a strategy to reduce this dependency by building its own sovereign AI capacities and establishing factories for modern AI chips.
In parallel, the Commission is introducing the Europe-wide innovation competition “EU Grand Challenge on AI for Cybersecurity”. This is intended to bring together security companies, research institutions and organisations to develop joint AI-based defence tools. At the same time, the Commission is calling on companies to deploy already available AI tools and open-source models to accelerate vulnerability management and incident response.
These measures are supported by strict implementation of existing legislative acts: NIS2 Directive, Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and Cyber Resilience Act. In addition, the Commission is planning a dedicated campaign to secure critical open-source software in order to sustainably increase the resilience of European digital infrastructure.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published 9 July 2026
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