Europe’s AI firms accuse US rivals of using safety calls to block competition

Europe's leading AI companies are rejecting calls from their American counterparts to slow the pace of artificial intelligence development, accusing US firms of weaponizing safety concerns to protect their market dominance.

French startup Mistral, widely regarded as Europe's best hope for a homegrown frontier AI model, led the charge on Friday, stating that "some incumbents are using this moment to consolidate their market position, pushing for regulation designed to favour them over competitors," according to Reuters.reuters

The rebuke is aimed squarely at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who published a 3,800-word essay on September 12 titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," urging AI companies to deliberately throttle the speed at which they improve model capabilities. Amodei also called for an antitrust waiver that would allow leading developers to jointly craft safety standards and proposed embedding permanent independent evaluators inside AI labs. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk voiced support for the broader push to pace development.reuters+4

Europe Sees a Competitive Trap

But companies and officials across Europe see a different motive. Raphael Auphan, chief operating officer of Swiss privacy firm Proton, called the US effort "totally self-serving" at a tech event in Paris on Wednesday. "They just want to preserve a dimension of dependency on their service," he said.reuters

Europe has produced few frontier AI developers and remains heavily reliant on models built by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft ↘ 2.20%. That dependency has sharpened skepticism about any proposal that could widen the gap. Ben Brooks, head of public policy at German AI startup Black Forest Labs, warned that enforcing distance between established labs and newcomers "on the basis of arbitrary thresholds will chill open innovation at or near the frontier".reuters

Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue was more blunt, writing on X last week: "It's not time to slow down but to accelerate." He did, however, endorse Amodei's proposal for independent evaluators.channelnewsasia+1

Political Leaders Join the Pushback

European politicians echoed the industry's concerns. French finance minister Roland Lescure told Reuters: "Making everyone behind them slow down so they can stay in first place — I can clearly see their self-interest". Germany's digital affairs ministry said halting AI development was unrealistic given Europe's need for digital sovereignty.reuters

Kristian Kersting, a professor of AI at Germany's Technical University of Darmstadt, described Amodei's framework as "regulatory capture," arguing that allowing a handful of companies to define what counts as dangerous and select their own inspectors "is no longer genuine regulation".reuters

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday that the EU's existing AI rules position the bloc to shape global risk governance, while Britain's King Charles hosted tech leaders at a summit in Scotland on Thursday to discuss the issues.channelnewsasia+1

Daniel Abbou, head of Germany's AI industry association, distilled the European position: "For European firms, this debate is irrelevant. We first need to catch up on our technological backlog".reuters