Europe's AI companies call the US call to slow down pure self-interest

Europe's AI companies call the US call to slow down pure self-interest

When Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged the industry to slow down, he got a no — not from risk-blind techno-optimists, but from European AI companies and ministers who see the appeal as a calculated way to lock in American dominance.

What Amodei actually proposed

In a web essay, as reported by Reuters and the BBC, Dario Amodei urged advanced AI developers to reduce the pace of model capability improvements and called for an antitrust exemption that would allow the leading developers to collaborate on safety measures. The backdrop was researchers' warnings about the dangers of AI, including that the technology "could wipe out humanity," Reuters writes.

The BBC highlights a tension in Amodei's message: he called for slower, better-supervised development, while at the same time saying the measures should not sacrifice commercial advantage. It is precisely this combination — safety rhetoric combined with preservation of competitive advantage — that the Europeans are reacting to. The BBC also notes that some have already questioned the motivation behind the appeal.

The no from the companies

According to Reuters, which reported the story on September 18, 2026, the French AI company Mistral and others have accused American competitors of using safety concerns to entrench their dominance — precisely as Europe struggles to catch up on the lead.

Mistral came out hard in a statement quoted by Reuters:

"Some incumbents are using this moment to consolidate their market position, pushing for regulation designed to favour them over competitors," the company wrote.

Raphael Auphan, COO of Swiss Proton, was even more uncompromising when he spoke at a tech event in Paris on Wednesday: "I think this is totally self-serving," he said, according to Reuters. "They just want to preserve a dimension of dependency on their services."

The German AI community is also responding with resistance. Ben Brooks at Black Forest Labs warned, according to Reuters, against enforcing a gap between the big labs and new entrants "on the basis of arbitrary thresholds," which he said "will chill open innovation at or near the frontier."

Governments and academia also say no

The criticism is not only coming from industry. France's finance minister Roland Lescure told Reuters:

"Making everyone behind them slow down so they can stay in first place — I can clearly see their self-interest."

Germany's digital affairs ministry considers it unrealistic to stop AI development given Europe's need for digital sovereignty, Reuters writes. Daniel Abbou, head of Germany's AI industry association, believes Europe should focus primarily on closing the technological gap.

From academia comes an even more direct diagnosis. Kristian Kersting, professor of AI at TU Darmstadt, calls Amodei's proposal "regulatory capture" — that is, the industry attempting to shape the rules in its own favour.

The divided picture in the US

Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Elon Musk (xAI) have, according to Reuters, also warned about the risks of ever more powerful AI systems and expressed agreement on the need to govern the pace of development. But at the same time, US President Donald Trump has dismissed fears about AI safety as a "hoax" and criticised calls for more safety guardrails, according to the BBC. In social media posts, he portrayed the safety debate, according to the BBC's account, as a conspiracy that in practice benefits China.

That gives a divided transatlantic landscape: American labs are calling for international coordination and a slowdown, while the American president rejects the whole issue — and European companies and governments, often regarded as regulation-friendly, are now opposing precisely that.

What it means for AI governance across borders

The outcome of this disagreement may matter a great deal for whether it is possible at all to coordinate frontier AI development across national borders. If the leading American labs fail to convince the Europeans that a slowdown does not merely serve their own interests, the challenge will be to find governance models that take account of the competitive relationship between regions — something no one has managed so far.

The status of the proposed antitrust exemption, and whether the EU changes its implementation of the AI Act in response to the debate, remain unclear in the available source material. But in the documented counterargument lies a clear priority from several European actors: Germany's digital affairs ministry and industry association head Abbou both point out that the technological gap must be closed before anything else.

Sources: Reuters via Charlotte Observer, BBC via MSN