BRUSSELS — The European Commission is finalizing a plan to make its artificial intelligence rules more palatable to companies, as they scramble to adapt to American tariffs that have sent shockwaves through the global economy.
The EU executive will launch a new “AI Continent” plan on Wednesday. According to an undated draft of the plan obtained by POLITICO, the executive wants to “streamline” rules and get rid of “obstacles” that it feels are slowing companies in Europe down in competing with the U.S. and China.
The strategy accomodates concerns expressed by Big Tech companies and AI front-runners, which directed fierce lobbying attacks against the EU’s AI Act and other pieces of digital legislation.
Those concerns of the tech industry were echoed by former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi in his landmark report on competitiveness in Europe and were included in the key priorities of Ursula von der Leyen’s second term as Commission president. The Commission’s tech czar Henna Virkkunen told a global AI conference in Paris in early February that the EU’s regulatory framework should be more “innovation-friendly.”
Wednesday’s draft strategy is expected to say that the bloc needs to seize the “opportunity to minimize the potential compliance burden” of the AI Act.
OpenAI’s Vice President for Global Affairs Chris Lehane told POLITICO in an interview last week that Brussels needs to keep its rules “simple and predictable.” Lehane is in Brussels this week to meet with EU policymakers — a signal that leading AI companies are watching Wednesday’s announcement closely.
The OpenAI chief lobbyist said he had seen “a shift in mindset of how people are thinking about AI and the opportunity” at the summit in Paris in February. But he added that the question is now whether Brussels “can get the strategy right.”
According to the latest tally only 13 percent of European companies have adopted AI.
Lehane said that besides having “simple rules,” the EU should also be able to build its own AI infrastructure and launch an effort to retrain European workers.
By 2030, the EU should increase its computing power by 300 percent, and 100 million Europeans should have acquired AI skills, OpenAI said on Monday in recommendations called the “EU’s economic blueprint” targeted at EU policymakers. It also pitched a €1 billion fund for AI pilot projects.
Show us the obstacles
The EU’s executive in its plan on Wednesday wants to ask the tech industry to “identify where regulatory uncertainty creates obstacles” to developing and deploying AI.
The draft text listed measures to boost the computing power and high-quality data needed to train AI models, as well as the industry’s uptake of AI and workers’ AI skills.
Brussels is also set to make progress on its effort to build five “AI gigafactories” — a €20 billion promise made by Commission President Von der Leyen during the Paris AI Action Summit. Wednesday’s plan includes a call for EU countries to invest in or host such gigafactories — a first step for gauging interest before a more formal procedure kicks off at the end of this year.
Those gigafactories are meant to train the most complex AI models and will have four times the processors of the current most performant supercomputers.
The Commission is also paving the way to expand Europe’s cloud and data center capacity. The draft stated that Brussels aims to “triple” Europe’s data center capacity in the next five to seven years.
It labeled Europe’s current reliance on “non-EU infrastructure,” notably American hyperscalers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as a concern for industry and governments.
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