No member of the center-right European People’s Party attached their name to the questions. Hagemann Snabe will report to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and tech chief Henna Virkkunen, both of whom are EPP.
Siemens played a prominent role in a push to exempt industrial AI applications from the scope of the bloc’s flagship AI law, the AI Act, as part of a recently concluded omnibus simplification procedure.
Last week, the European Commission defended the appointment, saying a conflict-of-interest assessment had been carried out and that Hagemann Snabe would recuse himself from roles at Google Cloud and C3.ai. He will continue to be the chair of Siemens.
Italian Social Democrat Brando Benifei, the Parliament’s lead lawmaker on AI, slammed the appointment as the “wrong political signal.”