Two top EU officials warned the United States government that limiting exports of microchips used in artificial intelligence — including to selected European countries — was not in America's own commercial or security interests.
"It is also in the U.S. economic and security interest that the EU buys advanced AI chips from the [U.S.] without limitations," the European Commission's tech and security czar Henna Virkkunen and trade chief Maroš Šefčovič said in a statement late Monday.
The Biden administration on Monday stepped up its efforts to block China's access to the advanced computing power needed to train AI models out of concern the technology could be misused or end up in military systems.
"It is essential that we do not offshore this critical technology and that the world's AI runs on American rails," the White House said in a statement.
Under the measures, United States microchip sales to "18 key allies and partners" would be unrestricted. Nine EU countries are on that list: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.
But other European countries could see caps and limits on the number of AI chips they can buy.
The EU relies heavily on AI chips from companies like Nvidia, the world's leading chip designer. These tiny bits of technology power the boom in AI chatbots like ChatGPT as well as other cutting-edge AI tech, including some of the EU-funded supercomputers used to train AI models from researchers or startups.
The top EU officials urged the U.S. to keep exports uncapped for affected EU countries.
"We have already shared our concerns with the current U.S. administration and we are looking forward to engaging constructively with the next U.S. administration," Virkkunen and Šefčovič said.
The back-and-forth between EU and U.S. officials could further strain the fraught EU-U.S. tech relations. Top executives including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, a close Trump ally, have stepped up their resistance to EU tech regulation.
Politico
More about:
