Opinion: Eurocrats plot to hobble US AI leadership on our own shores

The European Union continues to spread its regulatory tentacles across the Atlantic in an effort to hobble U.S. leadership in digital technology and artificial intelligence. Eurocrats have even set up shop in Silicon Valley to harass American tech firms. If this effort goes unchecked, it will undermine America’s current lead in AI and be a gift to China, which is advancing its computational capabilities rapidly .

In 2022, the EU announced the opening of a new San Francisco office to push American tech companies to fall in line with the growing array of tech diktats being issued by Brussels. The EU joins a growing list of European countries who have established “tech embassies ” in Silicon Valley to directly pressure America firms to accede to their extraterritorial demands.

The EU’s new office is headed by Gerard de Graaf, Europe’s “ambassador” to Silicon Valley. To staff it, he opened a public job search for Europeans “passionate about digital policies and tech regulation,” and later insisted American tech firms should accept that “the name of the game is compliance” with Brussels bureaucrats because “it’s important to have a constructive relationship with the regulator.”

Such threats are unsurprising considering how Europe has already decimated its own digital technology base with mountains of red tape. Today, 19 of the 25 largest digital companies in the world are American firms, while it is difficult to name any major European tech leaders. Increasingly, Europe regulates its way to last place in tech through costly mandates such as the General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act and a new AI Act.

As regulation becomes the continent’s primary digital export , Eurocrats are looking to shackle American firms with those same mandates here, while also doling out record antitrust fines and even raiding their offices back in Europe. The EU is next looking to hire an AI policy officer for its Silicon Valley office, who will “monitor developments relevant to compliance of providers and deployers of generative AI models and systems with the EU AI Act.”

Recent developments foreshadow how Euro-harassment will likely play out. Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, was present for the 2023 ribbon-cutting ceremony of the EU’s new San Francisco tech embassy. Breton recently made news after sending a threatening letter to Elon Musk warning of serious consequences under EU law for the “risk of amplification of potentially harmful content.” Musk’s alleged crime was hosting a live interview with former President Donald Trump on Musk’s X platform.

Breton’s letter directly threatened the First Amendment rights of American citizens and some claimed it was tantamount to election interference by a foreign official. But that is the sort of threat we can expect to see more of with the Eurocrats on our shores shaking down tech companies in the name of “harmonization” with their innovation-killing and speech-restricting mandates.

Biden administration officials didn’t bother rushing to Musk’s defense, and they have instead worked quietly with EU officials to kneecap American innovators. “There’s a lot of sympathy in the Biden administration for what the European Union is doing,” Europe’s de Graaf concludes confidently . Indeed, the current administration has pursued greater regulation of AI technologies and done so mostly through sweeping executive decrees instead of waiting for Congress.

Meanwhile, other domestic politicians have pledged to work with the Eurocrats. California state Sen. Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco, warmly welcomed the new EU consulate to the city. Wiener then went on to sponsor a sweeping AI regulatory measure, SB-1047 , which recently passed the California legislature. The bill, which proposes EU-style bureaucratic controls and follows the state’s emulation of EU privacy regulation with the California Consumer Privacy Act , would only strengthen the EU’s hand by following its lead.

America’s AI innovators thus risk getting pinched between bureaucratic claws in Brussels and Sacramento. This is a recipe for stagnation that only benefits China and other nations looking to race ahead of the United States in computational capabilities.

Congress needs to preempt both Europe and California with an AI policy framework that blocks their innovation-killing edicts. Congress did this a generation ago for the Internet by protecting the national market for digital commerce and speech. Federal lawmakers need to assert their authority.

The next administration must also do what the current one has refused to: Defend U.S. innovators and our First Amendment from attacks by foreign officials who would undermine our values and global competitive strength.

There’s no need for “tech embassies” embedded in American cities when foreign nations already have embassies in Washington. The only offices Europeans should be establishing in Silicon Valley are ones filled with innovators looking to escape the repressive EU regulatory regime that has stifled their entrepreneurial opportunities across the ocean.

Adam Thierer is a senior fellow in the Technology and Innovation Policy program at the R Street Institute in Washington, D.C.

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