EU Commission looking at practical consequences of Anthropic decision

joe_mamba

EU will start strongly "monitoring the situation" and "urging for peace" on monday, but only after after lunch and coffee break, then continue talks in september when everyone is back from their 3 month summer vacation, then have a meeting to decide when to schedule a meeting to decide on how to regulate the use of AI, then in 2030 authorize a massive 50k Euros package in funding to EU companies to build a domestic competitor to Claude, available after they fill 50k pages of paperwork, then post self-congratulatory boomer memes on X on how their AI achieved sovereignty, privacy and freedom of speech and can be access by all EU citizens only via their government doxxing digital-ID, just don't call them fat and stupid for this or the police will arrest you for hate speech. /s Yes, I know Mistral exists but they're into the b-2-b sovereign enterprise/government niche, not winning the consumer space. And if history taught us anything from the Blackberry vs iPhone wars is that products winning over the consumer preference end up dominating the market over those dominating enterprise. Simple as. Not many consumers and small-medium businesses will prefer to buy an inferior but domestic products for the sake of sovereignty, if the foreign imports can deliver better faster/results for cheaper. Same how Chinese car brands are now easting European ones on the European market. The free market is brutal and merciless when it gets to be actually free.

alecco

I don't envy the interns whose job is to explain things to the EU leadership.

kshacker

I think due to a variety of reasons EU and US are on a road to divorce. EU will be wise to make that happen on their terms, but they do not seem to be ready. - Monopolies and related regulation. Of course US has its own companies being treated as monopolies so they will try to save them - Social systems including healthcare - Russia being next door vs far away (for US) - The whole AI buildout - A little bit of Libre Office smattering at the government level Whether you consider US to be guarding its national interests, or whether you consider europeans to be taking a free ride on US's defense systems, it seems like 2 partners who got together for whatever reasons, you can even justify them in history, but history has moved on. I think we are going in 2 different directions for even the next president, however big a U turn he/she makes, I do not think the situation is salvageable.

dgellow

Please, for once, react in a meaningful way. No "we are concerned and will consider strongly monitoring".

willtemperley

Odd title, I’m not sure it was Anthropic’s decision. Practically this means Europe has a short window in which to catch up, while the US hobbles its own progress.

HlessClaudesman

If American services can be yeeted on a whim, American services can no longer be relied upon. The Fable debacle seems destined to be the canonical reason why the EU built their own software / AI ecosystem.

IveSeenItAll

It remains to be seen what the actual consequences of the "Anthropic decision" are. Will it be struck down by the courts? Does it matter anyway? (And, from my POV, the answer to that is "No" -- Opus 4.whatever did several fine jobs for me this weekend, and I've yet to be convinced of Fable/Mythos/Whatever superiority). Does "Europe" need a leading-edge model? Yeah, most likely, but chasing the "SpaceX-buys-all-the-Nvida-chips-then-rents-them-out" model is pointless, and the "China distills it all" market seems to be rather saturated as well. So, another vote for "meh", I guess?

amazingamazing

Why is anyone surprised? Anthropic has been screaming from the roof tops that their models are dangerous. Reap what you sow.

sajithdilshan

This is a wake up call for EU, but it’s already too late IMO. ChatGPT was launched in 2022 and since then only company in EU which has released a model that is even closer to a frontiers is Mistral. With strong data protection, copyright and privacy laws, it would be a nightmare for any company to train models because activists lawyers would sue left and right. Even by some miracle they come up with the model, again the hardware would be from US companies. It would take years to build a European equivalent of AWS and not to mention the talent required to do that. Given how low the wages in European countries are compared to American counterparts, and also lack of incentives from the governments I truly cannot think of a way how EU can catch up to US or China. Although I would love to be proven wrong

DeathArrow

Our best hope for non US citizens is for the Chinese companies to continue to improve their models.

monssooon

Hopefully it will prompt more EU investment into ai and hopefully EU will have something good in the future. EU will maybe never be like the US and maybe the US will be stronger and richer than the EU... But us EU people have nice weather and lots of good things like small cars and bike lanes and soccer teams and socker teams and suckerteams and lots and lots of windmills and sea windmills small tiny farms that are super cosy!!!

alecco

The White House has Sachs and Krishnan and the CCP is full of engineers. In contrast, the EU Commission: - Commissioner for Digital and Frontier: Henna Virkkunen (JOURNALIST, experience PR) [1] - Executive Vice-President for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy: Stéphane Séjourné (LAWYER, politics, but hey, his mom was a telephone switch operator!) [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henna_Virkkunen [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_S%C3%A9journ%C3%... inb4 Sacks is MD/lawyer... but he is a Stanford econ graduate, was PayPal COO, is tech VC, etc.

gls2ro

Whenever there is a discussion about EU there are very similar arguments against EU: - Too much birocracy - Too many taxes - Too much regulation that protects workers And I have to remind myself that people writing this are having a bias: they believe that in a system with few taxes (so less public health care, public eduction, less support for unemployment ...) they are on top, they are the ones with money, they are the ones that win the game. But when they are without money and in a precarious situation they too might vote an extremist that will promise to distribute wealth via the state => more taxes. You have a real example happening these years in a country that proudly promote itself as the best one in the world: low taxes, no healthcare, no free education, little regulations - the most amazing place to start a business. I am not saying everybody is like this, but it is very important to question yourself about where are you seeing yourself: as the one on top winning from the system or the one that has some needs. And second question: how many people will be on one side or the other? Regarding birocracy: this comes exactly from the fact that EU is not a federation so each state needs to have their voice heard and so a lot of regulations/law are complex => more birocracy. Of course EU has a lot of things to improve and a lot of regulations to rewrite and can and should do more for business. But let's not put those two in an antagonist system: you can support businesses while not punishing the people, the consumers, the users and the labor market.