Europe’s AI companies think little of slowing down. Reuters collected voices from Paris, Frankfurt and Brussels on Friday, and the tone is the same everywhere: it is easy to preach restraint from the front of the pack.
What the companies say
Mistral, by most measures Europe’s best shot at a frontier model of its own, put it this way in a statement: ‘Some incumbents are using this moment to consolidate their market position, pushing for regulation designed to favour them over competitors.’ The risks have been clear for months, the company said — what is new is only the timing of the conversation.
Raphael Auphan, COO of the Swiss privacy software firm Proton, told a tech event in Paris: ‘I think this is totally self-serving. They just want to preserve a dimension of dependency on their service.’ Ben Brooks, head of public policy at German startup Black Forest Labs, warns that cementing a gap between big labs and new entrants ‘on the basis of arbitrary thresholds will chill open innovation at or near the frontier’.
Clement Delangue of Hugging Face disagrees — partly. ‘It’s not time to slow down but to accelerate,’ he wrote on X last week. He still likes Amodei’s idea of putting independent evaluators permanently inside the labs.
The politicians follow
Kristian Kersting, professor of AI at TU Darmstadt, calls the proposal regulatory capture: ‘If a handful of large companies decide for themselves what constitutes “dangerous”, select the appropriate inspectors and demand an exemption from competition law, that is no longer genuine regulation.’
France’s finance minister Roland Lescure told Reuters: ‘Making everyone behind them slow down so they can stay in first place — I can clearly see their self-interest.’ Germany’s digital affairs ministry calls a halt unrealistic given the need for digital sovereignty. Daniel Abbou, who heads the German AI industry association, goes further: ‘For European firms, this debate is irrelevant. We first need to catch up on our technological backlog.‘
The complaint lands on a sore spot
I do not think the objection is cheap. A speed limit does not hit everyone the same way. The leader gives up nothing; the one trying to catch up gives up his only lever. And the evaluators Amodei wants inside the labs cost money and structure, which a three-year-old company carries worse than one with $65 billion in annualized revenue.
Still, the objection is a claim about motives, not about risk. Whether Amodei acts out of self-interest says nothing about whether the dangers are real. Europe is answering the first question very loudly and the second one not at all. Washington already turned the speed limit down, for entirely different reasons. For Amodei the result is the same.