Legislation proposed by the EU to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) risks jeopardizing Europe’s competitiveness and technological sovereignty, according to an open letter signed by more than 160 CEOs of companies from Renault to Meta, Reuters and Agerpres reported.

This month, European parliamentarians agreed on stricter regulation of artificial intelligence compared to a legislative proposal put forward by the European Commission.

Under the agreement agreed by MEPs, systems such as ChatGPT will have to detect content generated by artificial intelligence, help identify so-called deep fake images from genuine ones and provide safeguards against illegal content.

As ChatGPT has become very popular recently, several open letters have been sent calling for AI regulation and raising the alarm about the risk of “extinction through AI”.

Among the signatories of previous letters are Elon Musk, director of OpenAI, Sam Altman, as well as Jeffrey Hinton and Joshua Bengio, two of the so-called “godfathers of artificial intelligence.”

The third “godfather” of AI is less concerned about the danger to humanity

Friday’s letter was signed by Yann LeCun, another third AI godfather who now works at Meta, as well as executives from companies as diverse as Spanish telecommunications company Cellnex, French software firm Mirakl and German investment bank Berenberg.

The letter warns that under the proposed EU rules, technologies such as generative artificial intelligence will be heavily regulated, and companies developing such systems will face high compliance costs and disproportionate risks of loss.

Such rules could lead to the fact that innovative companies move their activities abroad, and investors withdraw their capital from the development of AI in Europe, the signatories of the letter also say.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who in May threatened to pull ChatGPT out of Europe if it found it too difficult to comply with future AI laws, has since revised his position and says the firm has no plans to exit Europe.