Over 45 business leaders from the EU AI Champions Initiative have published an open letter to the European Commission calling for a two-year “clock stop” on the AI Act, as the EU considers diluting some aspects of the law set to come into effect in August.
The move comes days after dozens of top European startups — including Synthesia, Lovable and Voi — published an open letter in Sifted demanding the bloc pause enforcement of the AI Act.
EU representatives gathered in Brussels on Wednesday to present a final draft of the Act’s “code of practice” to AI model providers. Behind the scenes, tech companies have been wrestling with lawmakers over the wording of the code, which will play a key role in how the Act is enforced against GenAI companies.
The signatories from the EU AI Champions Initiative — a coalition of 60 European companies brought together by General Catalyst for the advancement of European AI — include the founders of Black Forest Labs, Mistral, Mirakl and Personio, as well as larger companies like Mercedes Benz, Siemens Energy and Lufthansa.
The open letter warns “unclear, overlapping and increasingly complex EU regulations” pose a threat to European competitiveness.
“This puts Europe’s AI ambitions at risk, as it jeopardises not only the development of European champions, but also the ability of all industries to deploy AI at the scale required by global competition,” the letter said.
It calls for a two year pause on obligations for general purpose AI models (GPAI), set to come into force for August 2025, and high risk AI systems, due to take effect in August 2026 to allow for a simplification of the rules and adequate time for companies to implement them.
Sifted approached the European Commission for comment.
A risk to “competitiveness”
Hugo Weber, VP of corporate affairs for ecommerce software startup Mirakl, tells Sifted that the company feels “comfortable with 90% of the AI Act” but several key issues remain.
One is that the legal definition of a “provider” and a “deployer” of an AI system in the Act is not clear. “What makes you a provider and not a deployer is a substantial modification of an AI system, yet no one is able to define what a substantial modification means,” says Weber. “We absolutely need to have clarification here.”
The other issue is that regulators in each 27 EU member states interpret the AI Act differently, making it harder and more costly for companies like Mirakl – that don’t have the deep pockets of Big Techs — to be compliant across the EU, he says. The best case scenario would be for the law to be harmonised across all jurisdictions.
Weber adds that if US companies like OpenAI follow through with their threat to withdraw from the EU if the bloc over-regulates, there will be huge consequences for European companies.
“There’s a risk for European companies if they cannot use the model of OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Gemini, that they will be less performant, less disruptive, less efficient in their usage of generative AI because they won’t be able to access the latest models. There is a real competitiveness risk.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/startups-call-pause-ai-act/
