If many think that theAI Act, that is,Artificial Intelligence Act proposed by the European Union, is a guarantee and a safeguard for companies, perhaps they themselves need to re-evaluate this statement. Beyond the argument "AI steals our jobs" which can be easily disassembled, we need to evaluate well whether AI is really bad for business. They give us the answer themselves, since they are criticizing the decisions of the EU.
With the AI Act, many European companies feel the threat: artificial intelligence is not to be fought
Some of the largest European companies, including Renault, Heineken, Airbus e Siemens, joined forces to criticize the recent regulations on artificial intelligence approved by the European Union. According to these companies, the Artificial Intelligence Act may be ineffective and have a negative impact on competition. In an open letter sent to the European Parliament, the Commission and member states, more than 150 executives expressed concern about the AI Act's potential to "put Europe's competitiveness and technological sovereignty at risk".
On 14 June, the European Parliament gave the green light to a draft of the AI Act, after two years of developing its rules and expanding to include recent advances in AI, such as large linguistic AI models (LLMs) and foundational models, such as OpenAi's GPT-4. The signatories of the open letter argue that the AI Act, in its current form, could suppress the opportunity that AI technology offers Europe to “reunite at the technological forefront”. They argue that the approved rules are too extreme and risk undermining the bloc's technological ambitions instead of providing a suitable environment for AI innovation.
One of the main concerns raised by companies is the stringent rules of the legislation that specifically target generative AI systems, a subset of AI models that usually fall under the “base model” designation. According to the AI Act, the core AI model providers (regardless of their intended application) they will have to register their product with the EU, undergo risk assessments, and meet transparency requirements, such as having to publicly disclose any copyrighted data used to train their models.
The open letter argues that companies developing these core AI systems would be subject to disproportionate compliance costs and liability risks, which could encourage AI vendors to withdraw completely from the European market.
