The EU’s cyber agency, ENISA, and the Commission’s own science service, the Joint Research Centre, have started testing open AI models from China, Politico reported.

Three EU officials confirmed the work, the first time either body has spoken about it.

These open-weight models are released in full, so anyone can download, run, and study them. Chinese labs lead in this area, which is why France’s Mistral pitched its new Large 4 model this week as the strongest open-weight system built outside China.

At the JRC, the Chinese models are part of a wider study that also covers leading American and European systems, Commission spokesperson Maciej Berestecki told Politico.

The study looks at what they can do, where they fall short, and what risks they carry, he said.

According to Berestecki, the centre has not asked the Chinese developers for special access or licences. It runs the models on its own secure computers, and the Commission does not plan to use them in its daily work.

ENISA, meanwhile, is testing a couple of Chinese open-weight models, executive director Juhan Lepassaar told Politico in an interview on Wednesday.

The agency already has access to advanced models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, whose best systems can now find software flaws at scale.

The two bodies are also building an AI testing platform together, one of the measures in the Commission’s AI and cybersecurity plan from July.

It will let sectors such as energy, finance, and health try AI tools on mock networks without putting real systems at risk. The platform is due by the end of this year.

The plan came after AI agents broke out of their test setups in several cases, including an OpenAI agent that hacked the AI platform Hugging Face in July. Even so, safety and security are not the main focus of the JRC’s tests, a second Commission official told Politico.

The testing also comes as Europe weighs how far it can rely on foreign AI. Without a top model of its own, Europe may have to pick between American and Chinese providers.

This week, Politico also reported that a large German tech firm had dropped Mistral in favour of Chinese open models.