EU AI Act: the delay fight over general-purpose AI rules

The rules that will govern general-purpose AI models in the European Union are supposed to arrive on 2 August. That deadline has turned into a fight. The Next Web reports that calls to postpone the roll-out have intensified from some key stakeholders. Among them are Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, Bosch CEO Stefan Hartung, and the tech lobbying group CCIA Europe, whose members include Alphabet, Meta and Apple.

At the TNW Conference in Amsterdam on 20 June, Eoghan O'Neill, senior policy officer at the AI Office of the European Commission, addressed the potential delay. He said the Commission plans to finalise its rules for general-purpose AI, or GPAI, in July. The European Parliament will then adopt its position on the standards.

"This is a big, sophisticated technology, and we want to get it right," O'Neill said. "We need specific obligations to capture some of the most impactful or potentially harmful models under the AI Act."

O'Neill also described how the guidelines were drafted. A broad code of practice group did the work, he said. Its members came from major model providers, civic society organisations, NGOs, academics, AI safety experts, SMEs and European industrial giants. "It is a big tent with all of those voices from the stakeholder community," he said.

What the GPAI rules actually cover

The dossier does not spell out the full text of the obligations. It does show the shape of the argument. The Commission frames the rules as targeted at the most impactful or potentially harmful models. Critics frame them as a burden that arrives before Europe has fixed its deeper problems.

That second framing came through clearly at the same conference. Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO of Netherlands-based chip company Axelera AI, argued that the EU needs to reduce its regulatory burdens. His reasoning was not abstract. "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 the petition for EU Inc, a proposal to create a standardised legal entity for startups that would make it easier to operate across member states. EU Inc would sit under the bloc's 28th regime, a pan-European legal framework designed to help startups expand throughout the union. In a speech at Davos in January, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the rules would combine corporate law, insolvency, labour law and taxation in one single and simple framework.

The numbers behind the complaint

Del Maffeo stressed that regulation is not the only problem. He argued that the obsession with launching new startups needs to be balanced with a focus on scaling existing ones, and that this requires capital more than policy.

The data he cited is stark. Europe accounts for just 8% of the world's scaleups, compared with 60% in North America. No EU-founded startup in the past 50 years has surpassed a 100bn euro valuation. By the same account, the region is the birthplace of countless innovations, but it struggles to turn them into big businesses.

"If you look at machine builders, we are leading the world," Del Maffeo said. "In automotive, we are great, but we are losing traction. In robotics, we do great, but we are also losing traction."

Peter van der Putten, director of the AI Lab and lead scientist at software firm Pegasystems, echoed the point. He said the EU needs to become more attractive for investment, both domestic and international. The funding gap is easy to see. European startups raised about $52bn, or 44bn euros, in venture capital last year. Their US counterparts attracted $209bn, or 177bn euros.

"Investment could come from the EU, but also from the US," van der Putten said. "Regulations could be adjusted to make it easier and more attractive for funding that's leaving the US to flow into Europe."

Talent, and a warning about modesty

Europe may also have an opening on people. Elise de Reus, co-founder of Cradle, pointed to a growing trend of European engineers returning from Big Tech jobs in the US. Purpose-driven work and a better quality of life draw them back.

"We're welcoming European engineers who used to work at Big Tech companies like Facebook in the US to come back and contribute to solving societal and global problems such as climate change," she said.

Her closing argument was about self-image as much as policy. "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."

None of this settles whether the GPAI rules will slip. The Commission's own position, as stated by O'Neill, is that the rules will be finalised in July, with the Parliament then adopting its position on the standards. The delay camp has not got its way yet.

What the record does show is that the fight is not only about safety. It is about borders, capital and scale. It is also about whether a single market of many languages and many regulators can move fast enough to keep the companies it wants to regulate.