Europe is at risk of over-restricting AI and falling behind U.S. and China, Dutch prince says

cnbc.com:

AMSTERDAM — Europe is at risk of falling behind the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence as it focuses on regulating the technology, according to Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands.

«Our ambition seems to be limited to being good regulators,» Constantijn told CNBC in an interview on the sidelines of the Money 20/20 fintech conference in Amsterdam earlier this month.

Prince Constantijn is the third and youngest son of former Dutch Queen Beatrix and the younger brother of reigning Dutch King Willem-Alexander.

He is special envoy of the Dutch startup accelerator Techleap, where he works to help local startups grow fast internationally by improving their access to capital, market, talent, and technologies.

«We've seen this in the data space [with GDPR], we've seen this now in the platform space, and now with the AI space,» Constantijn added.

European Union regulators have taken a tough approach to artificial intelligence, with formal regulations limiting how developers and companies can apply the technology in certain scenarios.

The bloc gave final approval to the EU AI Act, a ground-breaking AI law, last month.

Officials are concerned by how quickly the technology is advancing and risks it poses around jobs displacement, privacy, and algorithmic bias.

The law takes a risk-based approach to artificial intelligence, meaning that different applications of the tech are treated differently depending on their risk level.

For generative AI applications, the EU AI Act sets out clear transparency requirements and copyright rules.

All generative AI systems would have to make it possible to prevent illegal output, to disclose if content is produced by AI and to publish summaries of the copyrighted data used for training