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

Europe's leading AI firm Mistral and others have accused US rivals of exploiting safety concerns to bolster their market dominance, rejecting Anthropic's plea for developers to slow down AI development as Europe grapples with catching up. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei urged firms to decelerate AI model improvements and proposed an antitrust waiver enabling leading developers to jointly develop safety measures, after researchers cautioned about the potential dangers of AI, including its potential to eliminate humanity.

While OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk concurred on the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems and agreed on the necessity to pace development, European companies and officials adopted a more skeptical stance. Mistral stated that safety concerns were already evident for months, and some incumbents are leveraging this opportunity to strengthen their market position by pushing for regulation that favors them over competitors.