Opinion on AI regulation: OpenAI becomes the gatekeeper

Tech companies from the USA are world champions at forcing competitors out of the market and taking on gatekeeper positions. The EU is therefore trying to curb their market power a little with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). For example, Google's Chrome browser now has to ask users which search engine they want to use when they first visit – - a nice attempt to shake up Google Search's dominance.

An opinion by Hartmut Gieselmann

Editor Hartmut Gieselmann, born in 1971, has been with c't since 2001. He is head of the Applications, Data Protection & Internet department and works on current topics relating to medical IT, network policy and data protection.

However, the DMA has so far completely omitted one area: AI. This is because the outcry from lobbyists and market radicals that innovation should not be "regulated to death" is huge. Yet it is precisely the unregulated market in which the market giants buy up or force out of the market every small start-up that could jeopardize their business model with an innovative idea. This market radicalism is the real brake on innovation, not regulation that strives for fair competition. The latter only seems helpless when it comes to actually breaking quasi-monopolies once the child has already fallen into the well.

In the field of AI, OpenAI has now achieved a dominant market position. Because its AI models form the backbone of Microsoft's Copilot and Apple Intelligence, they will be built into over 95% of all desktop computers in the future and can be called up at the touch of a button. Microsoft's Copilot is powered by an OpenAI service in the Azure cloud. macOS and iOS forward all requests that overwhelm Siri to ChatGPT – and there are a lot of them. In this way, OpenAI receives countless data, texts and images for free without users having to pay for them. This puts the US company way ahead of the competition when it comes to skimming training data.

Users currently have no way of integrating alternatives from Europe (Mistral), China (DeepSeek) or actual open-source models (Ai2) into their operating system to a similar depth. The least the EU Commission could do would be to put OpenAI on the gatekeeper list and use the DMA to give operating systems similar options to browsers and search engines. Another step would be an AI tax to use the revenue to promote the development and operation of genuine open source models with full data transparency in Europe. Users currently have only one alternative: switch off Copilot and Apple Intelligence.

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(hag)