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How much weight should we give to the existential risks AI might pose in a still-distant future, when the technology is already creating risks that are far more present and urgent?

In an article for the Portuguese daily Público, Arlindo Oliveira, Chairman of INESC, looks for the answer in the history of utilitarianism and its more recent developments, among them effective altruism, a school of thought with considerable influence across the major AI companies.

The fact is that AI already poses real risks that call for urgent attention: bias, pervasive surveillance, disinformation and the concentration of power. For those who research and develop technology, this argument brings responsibility back to the present and to the people the technology already affects today.

“Effective altruism and the arithmetic of doomsday” builds its case through Peter Singer, the trolley problem and Robert Nozick’s utility monster. Read the full article in Portuguese.

INESC TEC and Efacec have renewed a partnership spanning more than three decades in energy systems. The programme agreement, valid for three years with a possible two-year extension, brings advanced consultancy, R&D, technology transfer and advanced training together in a single instrument, a model INESC TEC intends to extend to other companies.

Read the full article on Science|Business.

Commission services are working on three scenarios that would cut the number of European Partnerships (research programmes the EU funds jointly with industry and Member States) from 60 to 18, 24 or 28, and the public consultation on the new design is open until 16 October. In the editorial of the September edition of “The Insider“, our Brussels HUB‘s newsletter, Ricardo Miguéis argues that “the cut is defensible, the sequencing is not”: Europe is settling on a number before agreeing what partnerships are for. He proposes a simple test. Each partnership should be able to state in one sentence what it exists to change, who commits what and how success will be judged.

This edition also features results from across the INESC system:

1. The Portuguese Government drew on technical studies by INESC TEC, INESC-ID and IN+ to develop the Action Plan of the National Energy Storage Strategy, which sets targets of 6.9 GW of storage capacity by 2030 and 9.76 GW by 2040.

2. INESC-ID researchers led the Portuguese contribution to Rhea1, the first European high-performance processor, completed by the European Processor Initiative for JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer.

3. The INESC Brussels HUB will lead TI-EDGE, a project selected for Horizon Europe funding. The consortium brings together 11 partners from eight Member States to make European technology infrastructures easier for companies to find and use. The project is due to start on 1 January 2027, with a kick-off meeting in Porto.

Read the full edition of “The Insider”.

INOV will be part of the programme of the European Researchers’ Night 2026, taking place next Friday, 25 September, from 5:00 p.m. to midnight at the National Museum of Natural History and Science (MUHNAC) and Lisbon Botanical Garden. Organised by the University of Lisbon, the event invites the public to explore different areas of science and innovation through a wide range of free activities.

INOV’s institutional presence at MUHNAC will be presented under the theme “Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and intelligent technologies”, with the aim of showcasing three projects and their applications in different fields: cultural heritage, fire protection and vocational training in agriculture.

Jacob Coxon, a researcher who worked at OpenAI and later at Anthropic, resigned last week, warning that the people building these systems believe they could mean the extermination of the human species before the end of this decade.

RTP asked Professor Arlindo Oliveira, Chairman of INESC, to explain what is actually at stake.

Arlindo Oliveira began by placing the warning in context, explaining that researchers’ views fall across a broad spectrum, from those who consider the question a non-issue to those who assign it a reasonable probability of coming true.

Arlindo Oliveira placed himself far from the end of the spectrum where he situates Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, clarifying that in the recent cases of agents gaining access to other machines, those agents were in test environments and had been tasked with finding software vulnerabilities. The leap from that behaviour to representing a risk of extinction is enormous, even if it is not conceptually impossible.

According to Arlindo Oliveira, regulation needs to improve, although two significant obstacles stand in the way. The first is that if one of the major blocs begins to regulate and the others do not, the technology carries on developing where requirements are looser, taking all the associated economic value with it. The second obstacle is technical, and here he points to the European AI Act, which took years to negotiate and was delivered when it was already close to obsolete. Beyond that, it remains unclear what guarantees can be demanded of probabilistic systems, which cannot be validated the way software designed for a specific function is validated.

Over a horizon of 50 to 100 years, with systems already contributing to the design of the next generation of systems, what is known as recursive self-improvement, the risk will grow and those safeguards have to be built now. To underline how much this direction matters, Arlindo Oliveira pointed to the importance of keeping nuclear weapons systems isolated from the internet.

Watch the full interview in Portuguese on RTP.

The Joint Research Centre, the European Commission’s science and knowledge service, opens the Security Research and Innovation Campus in Ispra today. The Campus brings together existing and new laboratories and connects JRC researchers with practitioners from Member States, EU agencies and other organisations.

Georgios Giannopoulos, Acting Director of the JRC’s Societal Resilience and Security Directorate, sets out the purpose of the Campus in conversation with Ricardo Migueis, Head of the INESC Brussels HUB, in the first episode of the INESC × JRC series on The Insider. The conversation covers the problems the Campus is meant to address, among them the fragmentation of knowledge and approaches across Europe, the time research takes to reach operational use, and the lack of common testing and standards across research facilities.

The JRC sets out concrete ways to take part, from training courses to short visits, secondments of at least one month and hosting agreements to work in its laboratories.

The five INESC institutes and the JRC have had a formal framework since 28 January, when they signed a memorandum of understanding in Coimbra.

Listen to the first episode of season three.

Over the years, INESC TEC’s research into electric vehicles has largely involved testing technology developed at the Institute through pilot projects with several partners. In 2026, INESC TEC created a dedicated smart electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Installed at the headquarters (located on the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto campus), it enables the Institute’s internal community to charge their electric vehicles, but that is not all: at the same time, it serves as a living lab for developing the power grids of the future.

Charging an electric vehicle at INESC TEC today means more than simply plugging a car into a power supply. The charging infrastructure available at INESC TEC’s headquarters has been completely renewed and now incorporates a new generation of smart chargers developed by the Institute itself, as part of the European GREEN.DAT.AI project.

Ana Teresa Freitas opens with the case of Sofia, aged six. In 2019, the laboratory looking into her seizures and developmental delay found a variant in one gene and classified it as benign, of no clinical significance. Her family was left without an answer. Five years later a doctor read that same result again, by which point hospitals across Europe had sequenced the genomes of thousands of children with similar symptoms and new research on the gene had been published. The variant was the cause of her disease, even though Sofia’s DNA remained exactly as it was in 2019. The name was not chosen at random, the author explains, recalling the character in Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, who discovers with each chapter that yesterday’s certainty has to be revised.

The INESC-ID researcher uses the case to show that the data training AI models in healthcare needs continuous curation by specialists, and that pooling information from many patients, the condition for telling real patterns from mere coincidence, means protecting every one of them. INESC-ID’s Life and Health Technologies line works on building these secure data-sharing environments with hospitals, universities and other Portuguese institutions, a step the author considers essential if Portugal is to develop genuinely personalised medicine.

Read the full article in Portuguese.

Europe is assembling a funding architecture that connects research to the market. On 26 June the Council agreed its position on Horizon Europe 2028-2034, which remains a stand-alone programme while linking closely to the future European Competitiveness Fund.

In this edition’s editorial, Ricardo Miguéis argues that capital placed at the end of the journey leaves the middle unresolved: pilot validation, regulatory testing and access to specialist facilities.

The Charter of Access for Industrial Users to Research and Technology Infrastructures, adopted by the Commission on 27 July, addresses that middle ground. Its six principles shift the discussion from the equipment an infrastructure owns to the service it provides, on what timescale, at what cost and under which IP rules. Endorsement is voluntary.

In Portugal, COMPETE 2030 has opened a EUR 45 million call funding that same interface capacity, from pre-commercial validation to demonstration platforms. Applications close on 15 October.

The HUB will publish the list of infrastructures across the five institutes. The next test is whether a company arriving from outside, with no prior contact with any of the institutes, can move through them in sequence, from design to fabrication or from laboratory validation to operational demonstration.

Read the full newsletter.

A new project, another chapter in the collaboration between INESC TEC and Taiwan’s NIAR, towards creating a platform capable of interpreting researchers’ requests and recommending the most suitable cancer research tools – more quickly, transparently, and reproducibly. These tools are known as PDX models, short for patient-derived xenografts – preserved tumour samples taken from cancer patients and used for research.

Speaking at Conferência .IA, organised by ECO at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Arlindo Oliveira, President of INESC, argued that Portugal’s five million euro bet on Amália has already paid off, just not in the way most people would expect. He also pointed to SAIL, INESC-ID‘s centre of excellence, as a working example of how Europe can respond to the pressure for technological sovereignty.

For Oliveira, Amália’s value has little to do with the model itself. What matters is the dozens of people in Portugal who now know how to configure and train large AI models, expertise that would likely have left for northern Europe or the United States without a project to build it around.

He also challenged ECO’s partner companies to explore technology transfer partnerships with SAIL, INESC-ID’s centre of excellence in responsible and sustainable AI. SAIL includes a joint doctoral programme with Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität and industry technology transfer projects, backed by 27.2 million euros from Horizon Europe, the Portuguese government and INESC.

INOV awarded the 2026 edition of the FAQtos prizes on 11 July, at the Congress Centre of Instituto Superior Técnico. The initiative, run by INOV in partnership with IST, recognises projects developed by secondary school students in environmental monitoring, digital health and smart technologies.

Jorge Sá Silva, researcher at INESC Coimbra, coordinates SHIELD-EU, funded by FCT under the DEFENCE + SCIENCE 2025 call for exploratory research at the intersection of science, technology and defence.

The project develops a defence architecture built on intelligent Internet of Things technologies, Edge AI and cognitive, emotional and behavioural models, to strengthen resilience against hybrid warfare threats, where digital, informational, psychological and operational dimensions interact. A central focus is supporting decision-making and response in high-pressure environments, processing critical information faster and more securely without relying on centralised infrastructure.

SHIELD-EU is developed in collaboration with the Portuguese Air Force.

Sérgio Jesus, a researcher at Feedzai and a PhD graduate in Computer Science from the University of Porto’s Faculty of Sciences, has won the 4th edition of the Adamastor Award, worth 20,000 euros. His award winning work develops a methodology to evaluate the fairness and explainability of AI systems used in real world decisions, such as fraud detection. The team also released two open source resources, the Bank Account Fraud dataset and the Aequitas Flow library, now incorporated into the Feedzai Fairness Suite. The ceremony takes place this Monday at the Ferreira da Silva Auditorium at FCUP, attended by the President of the Republic, António José Seguro.

Artificial intelligence attacks computer systems but also defends them. Carlos Ribeiro, researcher at INESC INOV and member of the management board of INESC INOV-Lab, examines this dual role in an opinion piece published in ECO.

He identifies three areas where this happens: cybercrime, attack detection, and attacks on AI systems themselves, considering the latter the most concerning. Put simply, an attacker can hide instructions inside a seemingly ordinary request, causing an AI assistant to act differently than intended, a problem that already existed since 1988 in other computer systems and now resurfaces in language models. Carlos Ribeiro closes by pointing to a structural imbalance between attacker and defender. The former chooses the target, the latter has to protect everything.

João Claro, Chairman of INESC TEC, spoke with António Costa Silva at Liga dos Inovadores about why bridging science and industry remains so difficult in Portugal — and how institutions like INESC TEC, with over 700 researchers and spin-offs such as Kep Soft, LTP Labs and Ilof, keep finding ways to close that gap. Listen at Expresso.

Prof. Arlindo Oliveira, Chairman of INESC and member of the steering committee of Portugal’s National Artificial Intelligence Agenda, was interviewed by Renascença and Público on the programme Hora da Verdade. The conversation covers the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, the absence of an integrated vision for AI use in public administration, the current state of the Amália project, risks for education, and the approaching threshold of recursive self-improvement in AI models. The full interview is available at Público.

In the seventh episode of ECO’s Podcast .IA, Inês Lynce, president of INESC-ID, explains how SAIL, an artificial intelligence laboratory backed by €27.2 million from Horizon Europe, was designed to bring science all the way down the chain: from research to companies, through advanced training and technology transfer.

The Adamastor  Award marks its 4th edition tomorrow, 6 July. The ceremony takes place at the Auditório Ferreira da Silva, FCUP, with the President of the Republic, António José Seguro, in attendance. The livestream is available on Público’s YouTube channel.

There is nothing like it in the world. The prototype is under development and already has its first mission scheduled for May 2027, where it will remain on the seabed for two weeks.

From INESC-ID: Ana Paiva, Joaquim Jorge, Miguel Pupo Correia, Luis Rodrigues, Francisco Correia dos Santos, Arlindo Oliveira, Rui Maranhao Abreu, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Leonel Sousa, Isabel Trancoso, Manuel Lopes, Mário Silva and Bruno Martins.

From INESC TEC: João Gama, Carlos Soares and Pavel Brazdil.

Europe risks falling behind in the global technology race — too fragmented, undercapitalised, and slow to adopt. INESC Chairman Arlindo Oliveira sets out his diagnosis in the seventh episode of ECO’s .IA Podcast, recorded after a trip to China, South Korea and Japan.