On 3 October, the Commission adopted a Recommendation on critical technology areas for the EU’s economic security, for further risk assessment with Member States. This Recommendation stems from the Joint Communication on a European Economic Security Strategy that put in place a comprehensive strategic approach to economic security in the EU.
This Recommendation relates to the assessment of one of four types of risks in that comprehensive approach, namely technology risk and technology leakage. The risk assessment will be objective in character, and neither its results nor any follow-up measures can be anticipated at this stage. In the Recommendation, the Commission puts forward a list of ten critical technology areas. Out of the ten critical technology areas, the Recommendations identifies four technology areas that are considered highly likely to present the most sensitive and immediate risks related to technology security and technology leakage:
- Advanced Semiconductors technologies (microelectronics, photonics, high frequency chips, semiconductor manufacturing equipment);
- Artificial Intelligence technologies (high performance computing, cloud and edge computing, data analytics, computer vision, language processing, object recognition);
- Quantum technologies (quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum communications, quantum sensing and radar);
- Biotechnologies (techniques of genetic modification, new genomic techniques, gene-drive, synthetic biology).
The Commission recommends that Member States, together with the Commission, initially conduct collective risk assessments of these four areas by the end of this year. The Recommendation includes some guiding principles to structure the collective risk assessments, including consultation of the private sector and protection of confidentiality.