On February 17th, 2026, the UC Berkeley Institute of European Studies, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the UC Berkeley School of Information jointly welcomed Birthe Panhans, UC Berkeley EU Fellow and IES Visiting Scholar, to present a lecture entitled “Competition in the AI Age: Evolutions in Antitrust Design and Enforcement.” Ten students and faculty attended the lecture. An expert in EU competition law with a focus on merger control and antitrust policy development, Panhans has 15 years of experience in shaping governance in merger control. Most recently, she served as Head of Unit at the European Commission's DG Competition, where she was responsible for the assessment of over one-hundred mergers per year. The talk addressed the question of how the rise of artificial intelligence is transforming economic interactions, and how antitrust frameworks must transform with it in order to protect consumers.
Dr. Akasemi Newsome, Associate Director of the Institute of European Studies, introduced Panhans, who then took the floor to begin the lecture. Opening with an illustration of the main implications of constantly-evolving AI, Panhans highlighted concerns regarding security, job displacement, energy consumption, creativity, electoral interference, and safety. She noted that as models have better decision-making capabilities, human judgment rises in value, which has an important effect on labor. She outlined the four aspects of why competition matters in the AI age – wealth, equality, power, and national autonomy – and explained the EU-specific perspective on competition law. Panhans highlighted the importance of the prevention of abuse of power and the isolation of markets, with the key principles being the prohibition of anticompetitive agreements, abuse of dominance, and merger control. According to Panhans, digital markets are growing exponentially due to certain “network effects,” and as such, demand new conversation on the competitive implications. Panhans also touched on the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the various related investigations into violations of antitrust law, explained in the context of recent digital sector cases. She concluded the talk by once more highlighting the various policy considerations required to deal with the new risks of AI and its regulation.