June 17, 2026, 08:25 GMT | Insight
The growing influence of huge tech companies that wield economic, digital and informational power means Europe needs to act to safeguard its societies and economies, the EU’s competition commissioner has said. Teresa Ribera said “mega-powerful companies” were entrenching their influence through AI and questioned their impact on democracy. She warned that recent US moves to block access to
Anthropic’s AI product highlighted the need for technological sovereignty.
The growing influence of huge tech companies that wield economic, digital and informational power means Europe needs to act to safeguard its societies and economies, Teresa Ribera said.
The
European Commission vice-president said “mega-powerful companies” were entrenching their influence through AI, questioning whether that was good for democracy.
“The challenge posed by digital markets is not simply that some companies have unprecedented corporate power. The challenge is that economic power, technological power and informational power are increasingly concentrated in the very same few hands. Artificial intelligence is accelerating that trend,” Ribera, who is the EU’s competition commissioner, said at a conference* in Brussels.
She said it would be “increasingly difficult” to keep this power under control “for the sake of the people.”
“The question is whether democratic societies are comfortable becoming dependent on a handful of private actors for technologies that increasingly influence economic activity, access to information and even public debate.”
Ribera wields the EU’s competition powers and digital rulebook, and since taking office in December 2024, she has targeted the likes of
Apple,
Meta Platforms and
Google with sanctions and interventions. But she stressed the power of digital companies wasn’t “merely a competition question.”
“It is a question about fairness, social cohesion and democracy. And it is increasingly a question about sovereignty. It is also a question about market concentration and dominance.”
Europe’s power to determine its own technology choices has been in the spotlight in recent days, after the US government ordered Anthropic to block access to Mythos — its most advanced AI model — for all foreign nationals, due to national-security concerns about its cybersecurity capabilities.
Earlier this month, the European Commission also published a new package of regulatory measures to reduce Europe's dependence on US and Chinese technology by building more domestic capability in AI, cloud computing, semiconductors and open-source software.
“Recent restrictions on access to advanced AI systems — like the ones witnessed a few days ago — have reminded us that technological dependencies can quickly become strategic vulnerabilities,” Ribera said.
“Europe cannot remain prosperous if it becomes technologically dependent. It cannot remain secure if critical technologies are controlled elsewhere. And it cannot remain sovereign if it lacks the ability to shape the technological systems that increasingly build and define our economies and societies.”
She said this dynamic meant digital regulation and competition enforcement were all the more important “to ensure that innovation remains open to all.”
This means that “new entrants can challenge incumbents; that publishers and creators can compete on fair terms; that users retain meaningful choice; and that yesterday's market power does not determine tomorrow's technological winners,” Ribera said.
* European Competition Forum Midsummer Meeting, Brussels, June 16-18, 2026.
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