Rules alone are not enough: this is how Europe risks becoming an AI client

This week, Apple unveiled HomeView, a new screen-equipped device that allows users to manage their smart home by speaking directly to Siri AI, the artificial intelligence service which, after a couple of years of teething problems, finally seems to be working properly. This is not a cutting-edge product: many companies – including Amazon and Google, as well as Meta – have long been offering ‘family-friendly’ screens like this one. However, Apple had to wait until Siri AI was working properly before launching this new product category, which will not be available in the European Union for the time being.

This is nothing new. Even Siri AI, launched this year by Apple, is still unavailable on the continent due to local laws. It has now become standard practice: a tech company develops a service or product and, rather than figuring out how to adapt it to EU regulations, launches it straight away whilst excluding the European market. They’ll sort that out later, at their leisure. This happened in 2023 with Threads, Instagram’s Twitter-like social network. 

“It’s the fault of the AI Act and the GDPR,” some might say, but it’s also down to the antipathy that some of these companies harbour towards old Europe, from which they have seen many legal problems (and fines running into the billions) but little innovation. There was a time when the EU seemed poised to carve out a role as the de facto global regulator (or at least in the West), somewhat along the lines of California – the largest market in the United States – which has often influenced the decisions of car manufacturers: whenever California made a safety system mandatory, for example, it was in companies’ interests to comply, making it available to other states as well.

Things did not quite turn out that way in the case of the EU, partly due to the increasingly close alliance between Big Tech and Donald Trump, whose views on Europe are now well known to most people. Are we sure that we Europeans are happy to end up as a mere footnote in the grand plans of some of the world’s largest companies? In short, is there a risk of being sidelined?

The situation might be more acceptable if Europe were producing and investing in innovation, but this is not the case. This week, Politico reported that some European institutions (and tech companies) appear to have decided to give up: we will never reach the ‘frontier’ in artificial intelligence. In short, no company will ever reach the level of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta or Alibaba, so it’s not even worth trying. A spokesperson for Mistral – the French company at the forefront of the sector in Europe – criticised this stance, calling it a strategic error.

Rather than joining the race, the European approach is to settle for ‘open-weight’ models – that is, AI systems that can be downloaded and modified. These are useful and important models, but they come from US and Chinese companies. Mistral itself has just unveiled its version of an ‘open’ model: it would appear to be a horse worth backing, not least in the name of the ‘national sovereignty’ that so many talk about.

One final point concerns ASML, which is based in the Netherlands and ranks amongst the world’s leading companies. ASML is central to the production of semiconductors – chips – including the most powerful ones. It is often said that Nvidia holds a virtual monopoly on the production of GPUs, the graphics cards that have become essential to the development and operation of AI. Nvidia, however, is only involved in chip design: they are manufactured by the Taiwanese company TSMC, which in turn holds a near-monopoly on semiconductor production. TSMC, however, relies on highly sophisticated photolithography equipment – a high-precision technique used to build chips. It is the Dutch company ASML that supplies these machines.

Its business is going very well, of course, so much so that it has orders booked right through to 2030: after all, everyone wants more chips and the only company they can rely on is ASML. Everyone, that is, except Europe: the company has in fact stated that it has no market in ‘its’ Europe, where, moreover, there is a lack of companies capable of manufacturing chips. It would be encouraging to at least attempt a response.