Almost 50 European company bosses call for pause in AI Act implementation

Calls for a moratorium on the application of the EU's AI regulation are also growing louder in the European economy. So far, it has mainly been large tech companies from the USA that have been lobbying against the comprehensive set of rules for artificial intelligence. Now the heads of 46 large European companies, forums and associations are mobilizing against the regulations. In an open letter on Thursday, they urge the EU Commission to suspend the AI Act for two years "before the most important obligations come into force".

"Europe has long distinguished itself by its ability to strike a careful balance between regulation and innovation", the letter states. This "European model" is "is particularly important in the context of artificial intelligence (AI), whose impact, as a transformative technology, reaches far beyond the tech sector". Unfortunately, this balance with the AI Act is "this balance is currently being disrupted by unclear, overlapping and increasingly complex EU regulations". This jeopardizes Europe's AI ambitions, as it is not only the development of European champions that is being undermined. It is also about "the ability of all industries to deploy AI on the scale required to compete globally".

The signatories of the letter include managers from Airbus, ASML, Lufthansa, Mercedes-Benz, Mistral, Siemens Energy and United Internet. According to their own statements, they employ hundreds of thousands of people in the EU and are concerned about their welfare. The Commission must accelerate its efforts to simplify the application of the AI Regulation in the interests of both small and large established companies. They would all contribute to promoting innovation "if they can benefit from clear and predictable rules".

Debate on moratorium

The stakeholders welcome "the recent discussions on the need to postpone the enforcement of the AI Regulation." Relevant guidelines and standards are still being developed; different industries are working together "to find solutions that work for everyone". The requested time-out should apply both to obligations that are to come into force in connection with high-risk AI systems from August 2026 and to the requirements for general AI models. The latter will in principle apply from the beginning of August 2025. The Federal Network Agency has just launched an AI Service Desk to help companies and organizations comply with the AI Act. In Austria, the regulatory authority RTR runs the comparable AI service desk.

The Commission announced – under protest from MEPs – months ago that the initially planned additional regulation on liability in the use and development of AI would be dropped. It was primarily intended to clarify civil liability arising from the use of AI. Henna Virkkunen, Commission Vice-President for Technical Sovereignty, has now also indicated that she will decide by the end of August whether the further implementation of the AI Regulation should be postponed. However, this would only be an option for her if a planned relevant code of conduct is not ready in time.

Two years ago, in the run-up to the adoption of the AI Act, more than 150 managers from European companies appealed to EU legislators to reconsider the plan for AI regulation. Otherwise, generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude in particular could face setbacks.

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