This exposes a huge quandary for European businesses and regulators.
From EuroNews, February 27:
Some critics in the European Parliament are mad about the deal but there are also questions about what happened and the EU plans to look into it
Microsoft’s new “strategic partnership” with French artificial intelligence company Mistral AI faces scrutiny in Europe, with some critics in the parliament saying they are “furious” about it as the EU AI Act was changed to meet the demands of companies such as Mistral.
The French AI champion unveiled its new large language model (LLM) on Monday, with it set to become available to Microsoft’s Azure cloud customers in a dramatic shake-up for the start-up.
“On a technical level and a political level in the [European] Parliament, we are extremely furious because the French government for months was making this argument of European leadership, meaning that those companies should be able to scale up without help from Chinese or US companies,” said Kai Zenner, head of office and digital policy adviser for Axel Voss, an MEP from the European People’s Party (EPP).
“They were always blaming the Parliament that we are making it kind of impossible, for those national champions, unicorns to try to compete with their global competitors,” he told Euronews Next.
EU countries recently agreed on the technical details of the EU’s AI Act, but only after mammoth negotiations during which France in particular pushed for concessions for open source companies like Mistral.
Zenner also said Mistral AI was making the argument that if their wishes were not fulfilled they would be forced to cooperate with companies like Microsoft.
“Now they got all their wishes, and they do it anyway and I find this is just ridiculous”.
He claims that the EU AI Act’s final version was rushed and the rules will be “attacked in front of courts” due to the concessions.
The partnership is also set to be looked into by the European Union’s competition watchdog, which also last month began looking into Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar deal with OpenAI....
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