EU AI Act: Brussels Says Rules Are Ready as Industry Warns on Competitiveness

The EU AI Act's main rules for general-purpose AI models are due to apply from 2 August, according to The Next Web, which reported the timeline on 2 July. That date is the news peg. The argument behind it is older, and louder.

Eoghan O'Neill, a senior policy officer at the European Commission's AI Office, spoke at the TNW Conference in Amsterdam on 20 June. He said the Commission plans to finalise its rules for general-purpose AI in July, after which the European Parliament will adopt its position on the standards. "This is a big, sophisticated technology, and we want to get it right," he said. "We need specific obligations to capture some of the most impactful or potentially harmful models under the AI Act." A broad code of practice group drafted the guidelines, O'Neill said. It included model providers, civil society organisations, NGOs, academics, AI safety experts, SMEs and European industrial giants. He described the process carefully: "It is a big tent with all of those voices from the stakeholder community."

Not everyone wants the tent pitched on schedule. Calls to postpone the roll-out have intensified from stakeholders including Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, Bosch CEO Stefan Hartung and the tech lobbying group CCIA Europe, whose members include Alphabet, Meta and Apple, according to The Next Web.

The industry case is not only about the text of the act. Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO of the Netherlands-based chip company Axelera AI, told the conference that Europe's problem is structural. "Europe is not the United States," he said. "We have many languages, many markets, and many regulations, both European and local. And these are stifling growth because they create borders, making it difficult for companies to expand." Del Maffeo said his company had signed a petition for "EU Inc," a proposal to create a standardised legal entity for startups operating across member states, sitting under the bloc's 28th regime. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at Davos in January that the framework would combine "corporate law, insolvency, labour law, [and] taxation" in "one single and simple framework."

Del Maffeo argued that capital matters more than policy. The numbers he cites are stark. Europe accounts for just 8% of the world's scaleups, against 60% in North America, and no EU-founded startup in the past 50 years has surpassed a 100bn euro valuation. European startups raised about $52bn (44bn euros) in venture capital last year. Their US counterparts attracted $209bn (177bn euros).

Peter van der Putten, director of the AI Lab and lead scientist at software firm Pegasystems, echoed the investment concern. "Investment could come from the EU, but also from the US," he said. "Regulations could be adjusted to make it easier and more attractive for funding that's leaving the US to flow into Europe."

There is a counter-current. Elise de Reus, co-founder of Cradle, pointed to European engineers returning from Big Tech jobs in the US, drawn by purpose-driven work and quality of life. "We're also maybe a little bit too modest," she said. "We should measure happiness, not GDP, which is not a sustainable metric. I don't think we should copy and paste the American system."

For now, the Commission's position is that the rules arrive on time. The lobbying continues regardless. The act's general-purpose AI obligations will be the first real test of whether Brussels can enforce a framework that its own critics say Europe cannot afford to get wrong, and cannot afford to delay.