Meta and Spotify complain about the EU regulations for AI

Meta and Spotify have issued a joint statement addressing their views on Artificial Intelligence (AI) regulation in the European Union. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek each complain in the statement published on their respective websites that EU privacy regulations around AI are holding back innovation.

The communiqués point out that Europe should embrace open-source AI, i.e., in a way that the source code is available to everyone in the public domain for use, modification, and distribution. Thus highlighting that failure to do so would slow down the continent's evolution since “artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the world: increase human productivity, accelerate scientific progress and contribute trillions of dollars to the global economy”. 

Moreover, this liberalization of codes allows “power not to be concentrated in a few big players and, as happened with the Internet before, creates a level playing field.”

Also highlighted throughout the letter is the “uneven” implementation of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The two tycoons highlight that EU privacy regulators are creating delays and uncertainty and are unable to agree among themselves on how the law should be applied. They cite the example of Meta, which has been prevented from using European user data to train its AI systems. 

“In the short term, delaying the use of data that is routinely used in other regions means that the most powerful AI models will not reflect the collective knowledge, culture, and languages of Europe, and Europeans will not be able to use the latest AI products,” Meta's blog post warns. Therefore, they believe that Europeans will not be able to access the latest open source technology and will instead be left with AI “built for someone else.”

Regulations that are contrasting with those of other countries such as the United States or China, who have decided to let their companies innovate as much as possible in this new technology.

EU laws regarding AI 

In recent years, the EU authorities have become increasingly invested in regulating AI uses and research. In fact, the recent AI Act (EU) passed in 2024 is meant to lay down harmonized rules on artificial intelligence and tries to provide AI developers and deployers with clear requirements and obligations regarding specific uses of AI.

The EU's concern regarding AI uses so much so that there is already a plethora of major laws regulating or affecting it: The EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679, The Product Liability Directive, which, if adopted, will allow people harmed by software (including AI software) to receive compensation from the software manufacturer (replacing Directive 85/374/EEC) The General Product Safety Regulation 2023/988/EU, replacing Directive 2001/95/EC Various intellectual property laws under the national laws of EU 

But, besides the regulations, another key element to understand Facebook and Spotify's concern is the definition of AI used in the EU. For the EU, AI is defined in the EU AI Act using the following terms:

• "AI system" means "a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment, and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments."

• "General-purpose AI model" means "an AI model, including where such an AI model is trained with a large amount of data using self-supervision at scale, that displays significant generality and is capable of competently performing a wide range of distinct tasks regardless of the way the model is placed on the market and that can be integrated into a variety of downstream systems or applications, except AI models that are used for research, development or prototyping activities before they are placed on the market"

• "General-purpose AI system" means "an AI system which is based on a general-purpose AI model and which has the capability to serve a variety of purposes, both for direct use as well as for integration in other AI systems"3