The EU’s new AI mantra: We’re open for business

BRUSSELS — Brussels doesn’t want to be a leader only in regulating artificial intelligence.

Top European Union officials are now keen to show tech companies, founders and investors alike that Europe can be a great place to do business, too.

AI innovation has taken over from AI regulation as a talking point since European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen began her new five-year term in December. She has seized on AI as a potential magic wand to invigorate Europe’s sluggish economy.

The EU’s AI pitch will go global at the Feb. 10-11 AI Action Summit in France, where the bloc’s top brass will need to bring their A-game.

United States President Donald Trump has doubled down on winning the global AI race by slashing rules and backing big investments, while the emergence of China’s AI model DeepSeek shows that other regions also have a shot at getting ahead.

The EU, by contrast, has the AI Act, which curbs some potentially risky AI services. Its provisions will be rolled out over the next year and a half. 

While the EU describes the rules as providing legal certainty for an uncertain new technology, it’s been a bugbear for tech companies, which claim that such laws only thwart Europe’s AI ambitions.

Correct course

The EU’s pivot from AI regulation to innovation starts at the top. 

Von der Leyen started her first term at the top of the EU’s rulemaking body in 2019 by promising legislation to deal with AI’s “human and ethical implications.” The draft AI Act landed two years later in April 2021.

By mid-2024, that tone had shifted as von der Leyen sought a second mandate and promised to tackle problems that could hold back EU growth, such as a surfeit of red tape.

AI innovation has taken over from AI regulation as a talking point since European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen began her new five-year term in December. | Frederick Florin/Getty Images

Europe was already leading in making AI safe, von der Leyen argued: “We must now focus our efforts on becoming a global leader in AI innovation.” That job was entrusted to the Commission’s new tech boss, Henna Virkkunen of Finland. 

It’s a hefty challenge. The U.S. is home to most leading AI model providers, such as OpenAI’s GPT series, Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. It also hosts the world’s biggest cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — and AI chips giant Nvidia.

European businesses have been very slow even to use the technology, with only 13 percent of them having adopted AI. 

Virkkunen, just two months into the job, has tried to correct that course.

For starters, she announced a €1.5 billion investment into seven AI-optimized supercomputers, half of that amount funded by the EU. The supercomputers should help European AI startups with training ChatGPT rivals. 

She also signaled that the EU is open for business, telling the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that action was crucial “because we know that we are lagging very much behind now when it comes to innovation and investment in Europe.”

She’s been more explicit in the lead-up to the Paris AI summit.

“Our aim is to promote AI innovation and investment in the EU,” she wrote on Instagram after a call with French President Emmanuel Macron and 20 European AI company executives. 

At the same time, Virkkunen and other EU officials have said relatively little about the AI Act, which at the start of February banned a series of potentially problematic AI practices. They also don’t seem to have weighed in on the drafting of voluntary rules for the models of companies like OpenAI, to the dismay of the companies involved. 

Spending

Money talks louder than rules, especially when it comes to the massive U.S. investment plan for AI hardware. The EU will find it hard to match that plan as the budgets of member countries remain under pressure and efforts to open up capital markets for investors stall.

“You have to spend a lot of money, and what we are spending right now is totally insufficient,” said Axel Voss, a German lawmaker at the European Parliament who leads the work on the EU’s AI liability rules. 

The emergence of China’s AI model DeepSeek shows that other regions also have a shot at getting ahead. | Riccardo Milan and Hans Lucas/Getty Images

“If you’re looking at the U.S., they are already [at] the top of everything, and now they’re trying to spend $500 billion once again on AI,” he said.

Some U.S. Big Tech companies say EU regulation is a brake on potential investment.

Meta’s chief lobbyist Joel Kaplan blasted the EU’s AI regulatory framework at an event in Brussels and warned that Europe will miss out on the opportunities that AI brings.

“There’s just a tremendous opportunity given the depth of talent and universities and R&D that exist here in Europe to become a real leader,” he said. “But that’s just not the direction regulators are going.” 

Google’s top lobbyist Kent Walker also warned on Thursday that the EU’s voluntary rules for the most advanced AI models were a “step in the wrong direction” for any EU effort to catch up with global rivals.

But Marietje Schaake, a former European lawmaker and one of the academic experts currently drafting a voluntary set of rules for the most advanced AI models, brushes those criticisms aside as attempts by the tech giants to dodge regulation. 

“[Tech companies] always want to say that the EU is cumbersome and bureaucratic, and now they attach that to AI,” she said. 

Nevertheless, the view has been reinforced that the EU could benefit from a more “positive approach” by prioritizing opportunities instead of regulation to rein in potential threats. 

“It would have been better probably to approach all this from this perspective of what we would like to achieve with AI instead of what is extremely risky and [what we] do not want,” Voss said.