As Data and AI become increasingly embedded in critical infrastructures and strategic sectors, security and resilience are becoming integral to their development and deployment. On the other hand, AI is rapidly changing the scale, speed, and autonomy of cyberattacks, creating new risks for Europe’s critical infrastructures, public services, and industrial systems. Europe needs advanced defensive AI systems able to detect, analyse, and mitigate AI-driven attacks, while also building practical expertise on emerging offensive capabilities. Therefore, AI and cybersecurity are increasingly interconnected: AI systems need to be secure, robust, and resilient, while AI itself is becoming an important tool for strengthening cybersecurity. This link is particularly relevant for sectors basics for Europe’s digital and physical infrastructure, including telecommunications, energy, transport, and healthcare. At the same time, defence-related applications of data and AI are becoming increasingly relevant across sectors, creating opportunities for stronger links between civil and defence innovation.
Finally, high-quality, secure, and trustworthy data is essential to develop AI systems that can defend Europe against AI-driven cyber threats.
This leads to the following priorities for this direction:
- Resilient data and AI ecosystems capable of operating under disruption and evolving threats, including hybrid threats (that involve e.g. disinformation) or cyber-physical threats. It includes advanced systems able to cope with threads like data poisoning (at scale with attackers injecting malicious data into pipelines), loss of provenance (hard to trace origin across federated systems), silent corruption (when AI-generated or transformed data degrades quality unnoticed
- Dual-use technologies and synergies between civil and defence applications.
- Convergence of AI and cybersecurity, particularly for critical infrastructures.
- Robust, secure, and trustworthy AI systems
- European Grand Challenge in AI and Cybersecurity, which could provide shared benchmarks, test environments, and curated datasets to accelerate defensive capabilities, and to help Europe close the knowledge gap, strengthen strategic autonomy, and build a trusted data foundation for next-generation security AI