Tech giants call for more uniform EU regulation for AI
Uniform EU regulation on AI: This is what a whole series of tech companies, researchers, and institutions are calling for in an open letter. The signatories include Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, Patrick Collison from Stripe, and Klarna boss Sebastian Siemiatkowski. Interestingly, the best-known AI startups from the EU such as Mistral AI or NXAI are not included.
EU should not fall behind in the “age of AI”
“We are a group of companies, researchers, and institutions integral to Europe and working to serve hundreds of millions of Europeans. We want to see Europe succeed and thrive, including in the field of cutting-edge AI research and technology. But the reality is Europe has become less competitive and less innovative compared to other regions and it now risks falling further behind in the AI era due to inconsistent regulatory decision-making,” the letter said.
The AI Act has been in force in the EU since August 1st, 2024, and was designed to prevent precisely this regulatory uncertainty. However, the set of rules is quite complex and many experts, including Gabriele Mazzini, probably the most important architect of the AI law, are of the opinion that legal certainty is not sufficient for many companies. This is already having a negative impact on the EU startup scene. Silo AI from Finland was bought by US chip manufacturer AMD and Aleph Alpha from Germany is reorienting itself because it cannot keep up with US providers.
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“Regulatory decision-making is fragmented”
“In the absence of consistent rules, the EU is going to miss out on two cornerstones of AI innovation. The first are developments in ‘open’ models that are made available without charge for everyone to use, modify, and build on, multiplying the benefits and spreading social and economic opportunity. Open models strengthen sovereignty and control by allowing organizations to download and fine-tune the models wherever they want, removing the need to send their data elsewhere. The second is the latest ‘multimodal’ models, which operate fluidly across text, images and speech and will enable the next leap forward in AI,” the signatories point out. The EU is currently falling behind the USA and China. In order to keep up with the rest of the world, a common set of rules is needed.
“If companies and institutions are going to invest tens of billions of euros to build Generative AI for European citizens, they require clear rules, consistently applied, enabling the use of European data. But in recent times, regulatory decision-making has become fragmented and unpredictable, while interventions by the European Data Protection Authorities have created huge uncertainty about what kinds of data can be used to train AI models,” the signatories complain.
Corporations want legal certainty for training data
The data that is permitted for training models seems to be the focus of the signatories. There is always the fear that users’ personal data will be used in this process. However, the major AI players see this data as essential, which is why they are annoyed by data protection regulations. Meta recently said that it only wants to use multimodal AI models to a limited extent in the EU. The AI Act, which in itself is a “uniform” regulation, is also a thorn in the side of many. This has already had consequences for the European AI scene and has actually caused the EU to lose a lot of ground to the USA and China.
