What does their open letter say?
Over 30 businessesincluding the giant American Meta (Facebook, Instagram), but also researchers and associations, call her European Union to “clarify” its regulations on the artificial intelligencein their open letter published today, Wednesday 9/19.
“Europe has become less competitive and less innovative than other regions and is now at risk of losing even more ground in the AI age due to incoherent decisions regarding the regulation of the sector“, the co-signatories of this appeal, including the Metathe French advertising groups Publicis and Criteo, the Swedish streaming platform Spotify or even the Franco-Italian group EssilorLuxottica, world leader in visual goods.
“Recently, regulation has become piecemeal and unpredictable”they report, estimating that the interventions of the European authorities “created huge uncertainties about the type of data that can be used to train artificial intelligence models.”
Faced with this finding, the businesses in question are asking European political leaders for “harmonised, coherent, swift and clear decisions on data regulation within the EU”.
The authors of the letter say they echo former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s report on the EU economy, presented on September 9 in Brussels, which warned of an economic disconnection of the 27 from the United States and the need “to accelerate innovation ”, especially in the digital sector.
The open letter also calls for a “radical change” towards greater European integration, but also for less bureaucracy.
At the beginning of August, new EU legislation to frame artificial intelligence, unprecedented in the world, officially came into force, with the aim of fostering innovation in Europe while limiting possible deviations.
The new European legislation mainly imposes on the various artificial intelligence systems obligations commensurate with the risks they represent for society.
Although this legislation won’t actually come into effect until after 2026, some of its provisions will become mandatory from next year.
The target of lawsuits in eight European countries, social media X pledged in early September to no longer exploit the personal data of its European users to train its Grok AI program.
Targeting eleven European countries, Meta was forced in June to suspend its plan to use personal data of its users in an artificial intelligence program.
