Europe is skeptical of artificial intelligence, but it still has to contend with AI-fueled cyberattacks.

In order to secure their enterprises and compete with U.S. companies, Europe has to change its approach to AI adoption, according to Holger Mueller (pictured), vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc. No matter what, humans cannot compete with AI-based threats, he contends.

“Europe is traditionally always skeptical of innovation coming from the U.S.,” Mueller said. “With AI, there’s a lot of conservatism, a lot of waiting. Sovereign cloud is a big topic, but it’s also a big excuse. It’s not a good idea waiting for sovereign cloud when you’re doing business on a global level, like many European countries are doing.”

Mueller spoke with Dave Vellante, chief analyst for theCUBE Research, and Krista Case, principal analyst for theCUBE Research, at Oracle’s “AI Cyberattacks Are Escalating: How to Secure Your Data Now” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed AI cybersecurity strategies and Oracle Corp.’s agentic AI offerings. (* Disclosure below.)

Europe stays suspicious of agents

Humans fundamentally distrust automation, Mueller acknowledges. The solution to security gaps in agentic AI frameworks may in fact be … more AI, he explained. One example is the Hugging Face security incident, in which an autonomous AI agent carried out an intrusion while defenders later turned to an open-weight model to analyze the attack after commercial frontier models blocked the forensic material.

Europe, in particular, needs to get up to speed on the security front.

“They need to resolve the tech debt they accumulated over 20 years as fast as possible because AI really makes you pay for tech debt,” Mueller said. “You may not have managed, may not have experienced on-premises [solutions]. But now you can only consume pretty much all of AI from an elasticity perspective.”

Constellation Research recently released an analysis of “agentic AI washing,” a term for companies that claim to integrate more agentic AI into their products than they actually do. When Oracle’s AI database offerings were tested against Constellation’s extensive criteria, the research firm concluded that the portfolio delivered on agentic AI capabilities without falling into that category.

“The agentic AI uptake last year was for the advanced companies to create the data source, the data plane for those agents,” Mueller said. “This year, everybody’s fighting about what is the better agentic framework. Next year is going to be the big renaissance of scaling the backend systems. And this is a great message for Oracle customers knowing that they have a highly scalable database.”

Oracle has benefited from being a secure transactional database provider for a long time while following a strategy that gives customers a traditional database with the option to take external workloads to a data lakehouse. Database scalability is critical for agentic success since it enables customers to upgrade to the cloud when necessary and continue to get value from their agents. And, of course, greater security is needed at every stage, according to Mueller.

“You need to have a selection in saying which models you use and you need to have a playground to figure that out,” he said. “You need to band up with a few CISOs to do red team, not red hat, but black hat, white hat attacks or whatever [you need] to figure out what is going on there. One side point on this … is if you think state actors will spy on you, you need to be quantum safe.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle’s “AI Cyberattacks Are Escalating: How to Secure Your Data Now” event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Oracle AI Cybersecurity 2026 event. Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE