The European Union and the New Frontier of Cyber Conflict: AI Agents, Strategic Competition, and Delivering Europe’s Cyber Ambitions

Conference Details

Date: 02 December 2026

Time: 08:45

Duration: 1 day

Location: Brussels, Belgium

Cost: Free, registration needed

Organiser: CEPS - Centre for European Policy Studies

Conference Website

Conference Description

The cyber landscape is entering a new era. As AI accelerates, scales up, and advances cyber operations, agentic AI marks a fundamental shift in the cyber threat landscape. It introduces new attack surfaces and operational dynamics that distinguish it from earlier forms of AI-enabled cyber activity. AI-enabled agents are emerging as a new frontier of both opportunity and risk. At the same time, intensifying strategic competition is reshaping the security environment in which Europe must protect its economies, institutions, critical infrastructure, and citizens.

Against this backdrop, The 2026 Cybersecurity@CEPS SUMMIT brings together policymakers, industry leaders, cybersecurity experts, researchers, and strategic practitioners to examine how the EU can navigate the changing nature of cyber conflict and turn its ambitions for cyber resilience, technological sovereignty, and strategic autonomy into effective action.

The Summit will explore what AI agents mean for cyber defence and security, how Frontier AI will impact Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure policy, and how to secure AI agents. It will also examine how the strategies of state and non-state actors evolve and how cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, geopolitics, and economic security increasingly intersect.

The EU framework was designed for human operators and static software systems rather than for autonomous systems operating at machine-speed within trusted environments. The Cybersecurity Summit will therefore address a fundamental question: how can Europe move from ambitious strategies and regulation to the capabilities, partnerships, and operational tools needed to shape the cyber environment?

Through high-level discussions and practical perspectives, the Summit will consider Europe’s place in an increasingly contested digital world – and what it will take to deliver a more resilient, capable, and strategically autonomous European cyber ecosystem.

Join us for a forward-looking conversation on the technologies, threats, choices, and partnerships that will define Europe’s next chapter in cybersecurity.