LLMs4EU kick-off event: building multilingual AI for Europe’s priority sectors

Villers-Cotterêts, 19-20 March 2025. Die Large Language Models for the European Union (LLMs4EU) project kick-off event took place at the Château de Villers-Cotterêts. LLMs4EU is a three-year Digital Europe Programme initiative coordinated by ALT-EDIC that will fine-tune models for five key sectors (science, public services, tourism, telecommunications, and energy) in all EU languages. The consortium includes over 60 organisations working in 19 countries, reflecting the breadth of Europe’s linguistic landscape. LLMs4EU aligns with ALT-EDIC’s mission through data acquisition, legal compliance, and evaluation for multilingual use.

Core themes of the event

The discussion focused on execution, from project coordination and early-stage legal compliance to pathways for adoption beyond pilots. The project will deliver tools and fine-tuned models for all EU languages and ensure consistency with European law, including the AI Act and GDPR.

Five domains, one multilingual approach

The LLMs4EU project partners will fine-tune and validate models for five sectors where language technologies can deliver immediate value: science, public services, tourism, telecommunications, and energy. Each domain is managed by industry leaders who are mapping concrete data needs so that models reflect real-world scenarios. This sectoral focus is the project’s hallmark. It links multilingual capability with domain specificity across European languages, including lower-resourced ones.

The project will also provide support for training, evaluation and legal compliance of the fine-tuned models. A series of Financial Support to Third Parties (FSTP) open calls in Spring 2026 will allow external partners and SMEs to provide data to support the fine-tuning and evaluation of the models.