{"id":1365,"date":"2026-09-18T21:00:39","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T13:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/2026\/09\/18\/europes-ai-firms-playing-catch-up-challenge-us-calls-for-slowdown\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T21:00:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T13:00:39","slug":"europes-ai-firms-playing-catch-up-challenge-us-calls-for-slowdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/2026\/09\/18\/europes-ai-firms-playing-catch-up-challenge-us-calls-for-slowdown\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe’s AI firms, playing catch-up, challenge US calls for slowdown"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Florence Loeve, Elizabeth Howcroft and Hakan Ersen <\/p>\n

PARIS\/FRANKFURT, Sept 18 (Reuters) – Europe’s leading AI company Mistral and others have accused US rivals of using safety concerns to entrench their dominance, rejecting Anthropic’s calls for advanced developers to slow down as Europe struggles to catch up. <\/p>\n

Anthropic’s \u200cCEO Dario Amodei in an online essay urged firms to slow the pace at which they improve AI model capabilities and called for an \u200cantitrust waiver allowing leading developers to jointly develop safety measures after researchers warned about the dangers of AI, including that it could wipe out humanity. <\/p>\n

While OpenAI’s chief Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon \u200bMusk also warned about the risks posed by increasingly powerful AI systems and agreed on the need to pace development, companies and officials in Europe have taken a more sceptical line. <\/p>\n

“Some incumbents are using this moment to consolidate their market position, pushing for regulation designed to favour them over competitors,” said French startup Mistral in a statement, noting that the risks had already been clear for months. <\/p>\n

MOVES BY US FIRMS ‘TOTALLY SELF-SERVING’ <\/p>\n

Europe has produced few frontier AI developers, with 3-year-old Mistral seen as the \u200cregion’s best hope for developing its own frontier AI \u2060model to challenge US and Chinese dominance. <\/p>\n

For now, the region relies heavily on models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic or Microsoft, leaving many wary of the ongoing dependence on US tech. <\/p>\n

“I think this is totally self-serving,” Raphael Auphan, chief operating officer of Swiss \u2060privacy software company Proton, told a tech event in Paris on Wednesday. “They just want to preserve a dimension of dependency on their service.” <\/p>\n

Ben Brooks, head of public policy at German AI startup Black Forest Labs, said moves to enforce a gap between big labs and new entrants “on the basis of arbitrary thresholds will chill open innovation at or \u200bnear \u200bthe frontier”. <\/p>\n

“It’s not time to slow down but to accelerate,” CEO of French-American software company \u200bHugging Face, Clement Delangue, said on X last week. However he endorsed \u200cAmodei’s proposal to embed “independent evaluators” inside AI companies. <\/p>\n

EUROPE SEES COMPETITIVE RISKS <\/p>\n

Leading AI developers have long warned that artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to humanity, and that safeguards are needed to stop powerful systems causing harm. <\/p>\n

Amodei argued that AI development is moving faster than governments can regulate. In his essay, he said leading developers should voluntarily coordinate on safety standards and submit to oversight by permanent embedded evaluators that would monitor compliance. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

“Unfortunately, passing laws can take time, and AI is advancing very quickly. Therefore, in parallel with the regulatory route, AI companies can and should voluntarily work together to set standards,” he said. <\/p>\n

Kristian Kersting, professor of AI \u200cat Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt, said Amodei’s proposals amounted to “regulatory capture”. <\/p>\n

“If a handful of large \u200bcompanies decide for themselves what constitutes ‘dangerous’, select the appropriate inspectors and demand an exemption from \u200bcompetition law, that is no longer genuine regulation,” Kersting said. <\/p>\n

European policymakers and \u200bindustry groups voiced similar concerns. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday that the EU’s landmark rules governing AI \u200cuse put the bloc in a position to shape global efforts \u200bto tackle the risks. Britain’s King Charles \u200bhosted tech and AI leaders to discuss the issues at a summit in Scotland on Thursday. <\/p>\n

“Making everyone behind them slow down so they can stay in first place \u2013 I can clearly see their self-interest,” French finance minister Roland Lescure told Reuters. <\/p>\n

Germany’s digital affairs ministry said stopping AI \u200bdevelopment was unrealistic given Europe’s need for digital sovereignty, while \u200cDaniel Abbou, head of Germany’s AI industry association, said Europe should focus on closing the technological gap. <\/p>\n

“For European firms, this debate is \u200birrelevant. We first need to catch up on our technological backlog,” Abbou said. <\/p>\n

(Reporting by Florence Lo\u00e8ve and Elizabeth Howcroft in Paris and \u200bHakan Ersen in Frankfurt; Editing by Dominique Patton, Adam Jourdan and Elaine Hardcastle) <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Florence Loeve, Elizabeth Howcroft and Hakan Ersen PARIS\/FRANKFURT, Sept 18 (Reuters) – Europe’s leading AI company Mistral and others have accused US rivals of using safety concerns to entrench their dominance, rejecting Anthropic’s calls for advanced developers to slow down as Europe struggles to catch up. Anthropic’s \u200cCEO Dario Amodei in an online essay […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-stocks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}