European AI Firms Push Back Against Calls to Slow Development

European artificial intelligence firms are pushing back against calls from leading U.S. AI companies to slow the development of increasingly powerful models, arguing that such measures could reinforce the dominance of established players. France-based Mistral said some incumbents were using safety concerns to strengthen their market positions, while companies including Proton, Black Forest Labs and Hugging Face warned that restrictions could hinder innovation as Europe seeks to close its technological gap with the United States and China.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for AI companies to slow the pace at which they improve model capabilities and proposed that leading developers jointly establish safety standards under an antitrust waiver. He also suggested permanent independent evaluators be embedded within AI companies to monitor compliance. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk have similarly highlighted risks associated with increasingly powerful AI systems. However, European technology leaders have questioned whether slowing development would create fair competition, with some arguing that Europe needs to accelerate its efforts to build frontier AI capabilities.

The debate reflects Europe’s broader concern over its dependence on AI models developed by U.S. companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft. French Finance Minister Roland Lescure described calls for a slowdown as serving the interests of U.S. leaders, while Germany’s digital affairs ministry said halting AI development was unrealistic given Europe’s goal of digital sovereignty. European policymakers and researchers remain divided over how to balance AI safety, competition and technological independence, with the discussion increasingly focused on whether voluntary industry-led safeguards could coexist with open competition.

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