{"id":91656,"date":"2026-05-25T11:12:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T11:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/91656\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T11:12:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T11:12:12","slug":"simplifying-the-ai-act-thats-brussels-saying-yes-to-big-tech-requests-to-water-down-regulation-euobserver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/91656\/","title":{"rendered":"Simplifying the AI Act? That\u2019s Brussels saying \u2018yes\u2019 to Big Tech requests to water down regulation \u2013 EUobserver"},"content":{"rendered":"

In November 2025, the European Commission unveiled its Digital Omnibus<\/a> \u2013 a package to make digital rules \u2018simpler\u2019 for EU businesses. <\/p>\n

The AI Act, which is still in the process of being implemented, also made the list. But even before the law has even fully kicked in, the commission is already trimming it back.<\/p>\n

That should not come as a surprise to anyone who occasionally reads the news about EU tech regulation. But now, thanks to a new paper<\/a> from researchers at Trinity College Dublin, Carnegie Mellon, TU Delft and the University of Edinburgh, we have something of a framework to at least assess what is happening.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The researchers put together a taxonomy of 27 distinct mechanisms by which Big AI \u2013 the handful of companies that build and deploy frontier AI models, plus the Big Tech firms reorganising around them \u2013 captures regulators. Or tries to, at least.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The group of researchers, led by Abeba Birhane, annotated 100 Reuters articles spanning three big global AI summits (UK 2023, Korea 2024, Paris 2025) and the EU AI Act trilogue negotiations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Together, they found 249 separate instances of capture mechanisms set out in their taxonomy: lobbying, private meetings, revolving doors, ownership stakes, hyped technology, \u2018speculative\u2019 studies, and the catch-all category they call \u201cDiscourse & Epistemic Influence\u201d \u2014 an unglamorous categorisation of the practice of telling everyone, every day, in every venue, that regulation is killing innovation until everyone believes it.<\/p>\n

By the third summit, in Paris, the average article contained nearly three of these mechanisms.<\/p>\n

The narratives, oh the narratives<\/p>\n

The single most common storyline deployed by Big AI in the paper\u2019s dataset is \u201cregulation stifles innovation.\u201d Number two is \u201cred tape.\u201d Number three is \u201cnational interest.\u201d Number four is \u201ccompetitiveness.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

If those four phrases sound familiar, congratulations, you\u2019ve watched a commission press conference, read a Brussels Playbook, or sat through any Ursula von der Leyen speech in the past 18 months.<\/p>\n

In her Copenhagen Competitiveness Summit speech<\/a> in October 2025, von der Leyen practically karaoked industry lines. \u201cSimplification,\u201d \u201cderegulation,\u201d cutting \u201cregulatory burden\u201d \u2014 language that is interchangeable with the open letter that hundreds of CEOs signed last year demanding Brussels back off.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The paper documents this parroting as a distinct mechanism \u2013 \u2018Government adopting industry framing\u2019 \u2013 and flags von der Leyen\u2019s October 2025 Copenhagen speech as a case in point.<\/p>\n

The Code of (watered-down) Practice\u00a0<\/p>\n

But what about the General Purpose AI Code of Practice, you might ask? \u2014 the document that\u2019s supposed to translate the AI Act\u2019s high-level rules into something developers can actually follow for models like GPT, Gemini, Claude and Mistral.<\/p>\n

According to a 2025 analysis<\/a>, it was continuously diluted. For example, in the final version, protections for human rights were no longer mandatory, but optional.<\/p>\n

Documents obtained<\/a> by Corporate Europe Observatory<\/a> describe \u201cyears of direct pressure, covert groups, tech-funded experts\u201d that \u201creduced safety obligations, sidelined human rights and anti-discrimination concerns, and secured regulatory carveouts.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The flagship piece of secondary legislation under the EU\u2019s flagship AI law made human rights (the thing the EU spent the entire \u2018Brussels Effect\u2019-era selling itself on) into a tickbox companies could choose to ignore.<\/p>\n

Go simplification!<\/p>\n

France\u2019s \u2018plucky start-up\u2019 \u2013 that isn\u2019t<\/p>\n

The paper also documents 10 high-profile revolving door cases across the US, UK and EU. Nine are outside the EU, but France gets one of them, and it\u2019s a beauty: C\u00e9dric O, former secretary of state for digital transition under Emmanuel Macron, who went from co-shaping French and EU digital policy to becoming a shareholder and adviser at Mistral \u2013 the French AI \u2018underdog\u2019 that, surprise, has spent the past two years asking Brussels to go easy on general-purpose AI rules.<\/p>\n

And let\u2019s be real, Mistral isn\u2019t a startup being crushed by Big Tech. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In November 2025, the European Commission unveiled its Digital Omnibus \u2013 a package to make digital rules \u2018simpler\u2019…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[104],"tags":[5754,211,210,5763,5760,5758,5761,5759,5762],"class_list":["post-91656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brussels","tag-typedefinedterm","tag-belgium","tag-brussels","tag-identifier30","tag-identifier4381","tag-namebig-tech","tag-namedigital","tag-termcodebig-tech","tag-termcodedigital"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116634920349466750","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}