Europe's AI firms, playing catch-up, challenge US calls for slowdown

European AI firms, struggling to catch up with US counterparts, have criticized the latter's calls for slowing down the pace of AI development. Mistral, a leading European AI company, accused US rivals of leveraging safety concerns to solidify their market dominance and reject Anthropic's proposal for developers to pace their advancements.

CEO Dario Amodei of Anthropic urged firms to slow down AI improvements and called for an antitrust waiver to allow leading developers to jointly develop safety measures. While OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk expressed concerns about AI's potential dangers, European companies and officials have been more skeptical, viewing the calls as an opportunity for incumbents to consolidate their market positions.

Mistral stated that the risks had already been apparent for months and emphasized that Europe has produced few frontier AI developers. Raphael Auphan, COO of Proton, a Swiss privacy software firm, criticized the US firms' self-serving motives. Ben Brooks, head of public policy at German AI startup Black Forest Labs, argued that enforcing arbitrary thresholds between big labs and new entrants would stifle innovation.

However, French-American software company Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue supported Amodei's proposal for independent evaluators within AI companies. European policymakers and industry groups have expressed similar concerns, with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen emphasizing the bloc's role in shaping global AI risk mitigation efforts.