By Florence Loeve, Elizabeth Howcroft and Hakan Ersen
PARIS/FRANKFURT, Sept 18 (Reuters) - Europe's leading AI company Mistral and others have accused US rivals of using safety concerns to entrench their dominance, rejecting Anthropic's calls for advanced developers to slow down as Europe struggles to catch up.
Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei in an online essay urged firms to slow the pace at which they improve AI model capabilities and called for an antitrust waiver allowing leading developers to jointly
develop safety measures after researchers warned about the dangers of AI, including that it could wipe out humanity.
While OpenAI's chief Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk also warned about the risks posed by increasingly powerful AI systems and agreed on the need to pace development, companies and officials in Europe have taken a more sceptical line.
"Some incumbents are using this moment to consolidate their market position, pushing for regulation designed to favour them over competitors," said French startup Mistral in a statement, noting that the risks had already been clear for months.
MOVES BY US FIRMS 'TOTALLY SELF-SERVING'
Europe has produced few frontier AI developers, with 3-year-old Mistral seen as the region's best hope for developing its own frontier AI model to challenge US and Chinese dominance.
For now, the region relies heavily on models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic or Microsoft, leaving many wary of the ongoing dependence on US tech.
"I think this is totally self-serving," Raphael Auphan, chief operating officer of Swiss privacy software company Proton, told a tech event in Paris on Wednesday. "They just want to preserve a dimension of dependency on their service."
Ben Brooks, head of public policy at German AI startup Black Forest Labs, said moves to enforce a gap between big labs and new entrants "on the basis of arbitrary thresholds will chill open innovation at or near the frontier".
"It's not time to slow down but to accelerate," CEO of French-American software company Hugging Face, Clement Delangue, said on X last week. However he endorsed Amodei's proposal to embed "independent evaluators" inside AI companies.
EUROPE SEES COMPETITIVE RISKS
Leading AI developers have long warned that artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to humanity, and that safeguards are needed to stop powerful systems causing harm.
Amodei argued that AI development is moving faster than governments can regulate. In his essay, he said leading developers should voluntarily coordinate on safety standards and submit to oversight by permanent embedded evaluators that would monitor compliance.
"Unfortunately, passing laws can take time, and AI is advancing very quickly. Therefore, in parallel with the regulatory route, AI companies can and should voluntarily work together to set standards," he said.
Kristian Kersting, professor of AI at Germany's Technical University of Darmstadt, said Amodei's proposals amounted to "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," Kersting said.
European policymakers and industry groups voiced similar concerns. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday that the EU's landmark rules governing AI use put the bloc in a position to shape global efforts to tackle the risks. Britain's King Charles hosted tech and AI leaders to discuss the issues at a summit in Scotland on Thursday.
"Making everyone behind them slow down so they can stay in first place – I can clearly see their self-interest," French finance minister Roland Lescure told Reuters.
Germany's digital affairs ministry said stopping AI development was unrealistic given Europe's need for digital sovereignty, while Daniel Abbou, head of Germany's AI industry association, said Europe should focus on closing the technological gap.
"For European firms, this debate is irrelevant. We first need to catch up on our technological backlog," Abbou said.
(Reporting by Florence Loève and Elizabeth Howcroft in Paris and Hakan Ersen in Frankfurt; Editing by Dominique Patton, Adam Jourdan and Elaine Hardcastle)
