The Financial Times publishes a letter from 0TO9 on how Europe should approach the EU AI Act. It is a reader’s letter, written in response to an FT opinion piece titled “The EU needs to rethink its AI rules”.
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Deregulation is not the whole answer

Aleksandra Stiller, Chief Legal Officer at 0TO9, welcomes the FT’s call to rethink the AI Act, but argues that “sweeping deregulation alone won’t help Europe reclaim its competitive edge.” Her starting point is the burden the current system places on businesses. In her words, the EU regulatory regime “has become a labyrinth for businesses”, and entrepreneurs, who “used to be builders of companies”, now “look more like contortionists, bending over backwards to keep up with the latest directives.”

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Piecemeal rollbacks

She points to recent leaks of proposals to limit the scope of GDPR and to revise the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. In her reading, these show that some policymakers in Brussels recognise the problem. She does not think they go far enough: “piecemeal rollbacks aren’t enough to arrest our competitive decline.”
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Fewer rules, or simpler ones

Stiller sees the AI Act as a chance to start again. Her argument is about the design of the rules rather than their number: “This doesn’t necessarily mean fewer rules, just less complicated ones.” That means, she writes, a regulation that “operates in harmony with all 27 member states”, because “only by unifying rules across the continent can we begin to restore our competitive edge.”

Full statement in Financial Times.