Margrethe Vestager
Former EU Competition Chief
The EU’s longtime competition and digital chief shepherded the AI Act, arguing guardrails must precede deployment — and that AI’s real danger is discrimination at scale, not human extinction.
In her words
In order to make the most of this technology, guardrails are needed.
We need to act now.
Biography
Margrethe Vestager (born 1968), a former Danish deputy prime minister, spent a decade as the European Union’s most feared regulator — competition commissioner from 2014 and executive vice-president for “a Europe fit for the digital age” from 2019 to 2024. Having levied billions in fines against Google and Apple, she turned the same instincts on artificial intelligence.
Guardrails before deployment
Vestager co-led the Commission’s work on the AI Act from its 2021 proposal through its 2024 adoption. In May 2023, warning that formal legislation would land “way too late” for the generative AI wave, she pushed the US and EU to agree a stopgap voluntary code of conduct for AI companies within weeks. In a June 2023 BBC interview she deliberately broke with the extinction-risk framing then dominating headlines, saying the likelihood of such doomsday scenarios was small — the pressing risks were that people would be discriminated against by AI deciding on their mortgages and benefits, and that AI could be used to sway elections.
Her stance was regulatory, not rejectionist: she consistently argued that trustworthy AI, governed early, was how Europe would actually adopt the technology. Critics — including many European founders — countered that her legacy of rules-first policy left the continent a spectator in the AI race. She left the Commission at the end of her mandate in late 2024.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/margrethe-vestager