Tech companies warn over EU AI regulation

Tech companies and business leaders including Meta, Stripe’s Patrick Collison, Spotify, SAP and Ericsson have issued an open letter warning that Europe is at risk of falling behind in the artificial intelligence (AI) era due to what they describe as fragmented regulations.

The letter calls for urgent action to harmonise regulations across the EU, stating that Europe could miss out due to inconsistent regulatory frameworks.

“Europe can’t afford to miss out on the widespread benefits from responsibly built open AI technologies that will accelerate economic growth and unlock progress in scientific research,” the letter states.

“For that we need harmonised, consistent, quick and clear decisions under EU data regulations that enable European data to be used in AI training for the benefit of Europeans,” it adds.

Last week, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) said it had opened an inquiry into whether Google had complied with European Union privacy laws in the development of one of its artificial intelligence models.

Earlier this month, a High Court dispute between X, formerly Twitter, and the DPC over the use of personal data to train AI systems was resolved.

In June, Meta announced that it was pausing plans to use personal data to train AI models after concerns were raised by the DPC.

The following month, Meta said it would withhold the roll out of future multimodal AI models in the EU over what it described as the “unpredictable nature” of the European regulatory environment.

Multimodal AI models are capable of processing data across video, audio, images and text on a variety of devices.