Executives from Google and Meta claim that strict regulations are holding back Europe’s AI industry, echoing concerns from the Trump administration that heavy tech rules are stifling innovation.
At the Techarena tech conference in Stockholm, Sweden, public policy chiefs from Google and Meta criticized the EU’s strict regulations on AI and machine learning, arguing that they hinder innovation and competitiveness.
“I think there is now broad consensus that European regulation around technology has its issues, and sometimes it’s too fragmented, like GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], sometimes it goes too far, like the AI Act,” Chris Yiu, Meta’s director of public policy, told an audience of tech founders and investors at Techarena on Thursday.
“But the net result of all of that is that products get delayed or get watered down and European citizens and consumers suffer,” he said.
Yiu showcased a pair of Meta’s newly launched Ray-Ban smart glasses, which use AI to translate speech in real time and describe images for the visually impaired.
“This is a profound and very human application of the technology, and it is slow to arrive in Europe because of the issues that we have around regulation,” Yiu said.
Meta started rolling out AI features for its Ray-Ban Meta glasses in select European countries in November, after a delay the company attributed to the challenges of complying with Europe’s complex regulatory system.
Meta has previously raised concerns about complying with the AI Act, the EU’s landmark law regulating AI, citing “unpredictable” implementation as a key challenge.
The firm also stated that GDPR, the EU’s data privacy law introduced in 2018, delayed the launch of its smart glasses in Europe due to concerns over its use of Instagram and Facebook data to train AI models.
Big Tech firms have increasingly criticized the EU’s tech regulations and intensified lobbying efforts to ease certain provisions of the AI Act.
