Zuckerberg: It’s ‘sad’ that EU is left behind on AI

Mark Zuckerberg tells Meta staff not to push out new artificial intelligence services in the European Union – and he thinks that’s sad. 

Meta’s chief executive commented late Wednesday on Threads – Meta’s X-like social media platform – saying it’s “sad that I basically have to tell our teams to launch our new AI advances everywhere except the EU at this point.”

Meta initially held back its EU launch of Threads because of “regulatory uncertainty,” in particular the EU’s new digital competition regulation, the Digital Markets Act. Apple also paused an AI rollout in the EU citing the regulatory environment.

Zuckerberg was responding to a post by Nick Clegg, Meta’s chief lobbyist, about a long-awaited document on how the EU’s strict data protection rules apply to AI models.

Clegg said that the company “welcomes” the guidance but moaned that it has taken “many months of unnecessary delay for regulators to approve the same legal mechanisms that the industry proposed at the start of this year.”

Zuckerberg and Clegg’s comments echo gripes that uncertainty about how the General Data Protection Regulation applies to AI is holding back innovation in the EU.

“This slow motion decision making prevents Europeans from accessing the latest AI technology,” Clegg wrote. “We urge European regulators to quickly apply these principles in a pragmatic and transparent way so the EU can deliver the growth that leading European political figures are calling for.”