Amid all the focus on Nvidia and DeepSeek today, we should not forget that the EU’s (purported) role as a “regulatory superpower” is meant to extend over AI too.
From December 2023, here’s a tweet by Musk antagonist and would-be censor Thierry Breton celebrating the EU’s own contribution to AI:
The EU becomes the very first continent to set clear rules for the use of AI. The #AIAct is much more than a rulebook — it’s a launchpad for EU startups and researchers to lead the global AI race. The best is yet to come!
Still waiting.
In a recent article for the Financial Times, Marietje Schaake, a former Dutch MEP and for want of a better phrase, a member of the transnational establishment’s aspiring AI “governance” clique, grumbles about Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and frets that:
Everything the EU has been working on for the past five years as a self-declared “super-regulator” will soon be challenged: from its ambitions of greater strategic autonomy to digital sovereignty, improving digital competition and shoring up responsibilities of corporate content moderation. The nascent streamlining between the US and the EU on artificial intelligence governance and antitrust must be considered over. Trump has promised to throw out his predecessor’s AI executive order and prevent any break-up of Google.
Schaake is to be commended for her honesty in describing the EU as a self-declared “super-regulator.” Questions about content moderation can wait for another day, but it was not reassuring to read her reference to “the nascent streamlining between the US and the EU on artificial intelligence governance and antitrust.” The EU has used trumped-up “antitrust” complaints as a device to loot U.S. high tech companies for years. The appropriate response should be retaliation, not (as up to now) submission. And quite why the EU has anything to contribute to the “governance” of American AI escapes me.
According to the U.S. law firm White & Case, the EU’s AI Act is designed to help the EU “become a global hub for human-centric, trustworthy AI.” The Brussels technocracy is a nest of post-democrats presiding over a bloc filled with AI laggards. Then again, that it should consider itself suited for this role shows, if nothing else, chutzpah.
From the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel:
In the first half of 2024 alone, more than $35 billion was invested globally into artificial intelligence startups. The European Union attracted only 6 percent of that. The EU is doing better in AI patents and in training AI researchers, but the outputs from this tend not to stay in the EU, but rather to flow to the United States (Renda, 2024).
Schaake writes that, since Trump’s election, the “nascent streamlining between the US and the EU on artificial intelligence governance must be considered over.”
Good.
Schaake argues that “for years the EU has prided itself on being a regulatory powerhouse, creating the world’s most ambitious tech governance. The Trump administration and its new tech CEO allies are ready to test the EU’s resolve.”
It might have been better if the EU had made more of an effort to becoming a technological powerhouse, but there we are. Innovation was sacrificed in favor of regulation and the ecosystem it feeds. Ironically, the advantage (if economist John Cochrane is right) that DeepSeek’s presumed advance will give to AI users rather than creators may offer the Brussels bloc a second chance to assume a leading role in this area. It should focus on that, not in trying to regulate a sector likely to be dominated at least for a while by, as DeepSeek reminds us, a massive contest between the U.S. and China. Any agreement that China signs with regard to AI governance is worthless, and it would be against America’s interest to see itself hobbled in this area by the edicts of the self-proclaimed regulatory superpower.
In AI, the EU is (for now) an also-ran. If that changes, the U.S. should pay it more attention, but, as things stand, Brussels’s heavy-handed regulatory model has nothing to offer this country.
Schaake adds:
If the Trump administration adopts a combative stance on trade, tech and security, the EU must be prepared to respond. EU leaders must be crystal clear on what can and cannot be negotiated and appreciate the price (or cost) of strategic autonomy. Now is the time to be bold and assess the possibilities for decoupling and lower dependency on US tech companies. But this will require unprecedented political leadership.
This would be a leadership that would drive the EU over the cliff and into the jaws of Putin and Xi. Fortunately, I doubt if the countries in the bloc’s increasingly powerful northeast would have anything to do with it.