Europe's AI Firms Push Back Against US Calls to Slow Development

European AI companies and policymakers have pushed back against calls from US rivals to slow the pace of artificial intelligence development, accusing them of using safety concerns to entrench their market dominance.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in an online essay, urged firms to slow improvements to AI model capabilities and called for an antitrust waiver so leading developers could jointly develop safety measures. He argued that AI is advancing faster than governments can regulate, and that companies should voluntarily coordinate on safety standards and submit to oversight by embedded evaluators.

OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk have also warned about the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems and agreed on the need to pace development. But European companies and officials have taken a more sceptical line.

French startup Mistral, seen as Europe's best hope for a frontier AI model, said some incumbents were using the moment to consolidate their market position by pushing for regulation designed to favour them over competitors. The region currently relies heavily on models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft.

"I think this is totally self-serving," said Raphael Auphan, chief operating officer of Swiss privacy software company Proton, at a tech event in Paris. "They just want to preserve a dimension of dependency on their service."

Ben Brooks, head of public policy at German AI startup Black Forest Labs, warned that enforcing a gap between big labs and new entrants "on the basis of arbitrary thresholds will chill open innovation at or near the frontier".

Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said it was "not time to slow down but to accelerate", though he endorsed Amodei's proposal to embed independent evaluators inside AI companies.

Kristian Kersting, a professor of AI at Germany's Technical University of Darmstadt, described Amodei's proposals as "regulatory capture", arguing that letting a handful of large companies define what is dangerous and select their own inspectors is not genuine regulation.

European policymakers voiced similar concerns. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the EU's landmark AI rules put the bloc in a position to shape global efforts to tackle risks. Britain's King Charles hosted tech and AI leaders at a summit in Scotland.

"Making everyone behind them slow down so they can stay in first place – I can clearly see their self-interest," French finance minister Roland Lescure said.

Germany's digital affairs ministry said stopping AI development was unrealistic given Europe's need for digital sovereignty. Daniel Abbou, head of Germany's AI industry association, said Europe should focus on closing the technological gap, adding that for European firms the debate is irrelevant.