Meddling Eurocrats are dragging the bloc back to the Dark Ages

When consumers across Europe collect their eagerly awaited new iPhones this week, they’ll notice that the widely anticipated “Apple Intelligence” AI features are conspicuously absent.

While the UK, the US and other markets take the next step forward, the EU version of these products has been dumbed down as a consequence of regulation from Brussels, making every UK use of the Apple AI prompt a mini “Brexit dividend”.

Governments the world over are often tempted to think of new technology through the lens of problems that need solving with additional laws. It’s a form of policymaking that has long been entangled with those claiming to protect the interests of workers.

Indeed, we saw the trade unions, who have donated more than £29m to the Labour Party under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership, predictably calling for prohibitive laws at last week’s TUC conference. None of this anti-innovation approach is new, and none of it has ever made anybody better off.

When 19th-century Nottingham textile workers adopted “King Ludd” from a local myth, they may have thought they were safeguarding their livelihoods.

Instead, had the Luddites been successful, they would have prevented the greatest revolution in productivity the world had ever seen – one which provided British families with high standards of living and built the basis of the modern economy we have today.

Today the Luddites live in Brussels, close to their French cousins who threw wooden clogs called “sabots” into the new machinery they so distrusted to equip their factories.

In its zeal to regulate a technology that its own regulators seem barely to understand, the EU has crafted a behemoth it now cannot control, introducing onerous compliance requirements alongside uncertainty across the board as to whom they apply to.

The effects of this “regulate first, ask questions later” approach to AI by the EU have been almost instant. Meta has pulled its most advanced AI models, designed for professional use, from the entire EU market.

Daniel Ek, of Spotify, (an early business case for the power of predictive AI) said “the stark reality is that laws designed to increase European sovereignty and competitiveness are achieving the opposite” and that “many European chief executives, across a range of industries, cite a complex and incoherent regulatory environment as one reason for the continent’s lack of competitiveness”.

In the same vein, this week a group of leading AI labs felt it necessary to take out a full-page newspaper advert warning of the dangers of the EU’s regulation of AI.  The uncertainty created by both the regulation itself, and by its inconsistent application, risks doing huge damage to the sector.

In the worst-case scenario, many labs will decide that even trying to comply is simply not commercially worthwhile, choosing instead to up sticks and flee to greener pastures outside of Brussels’ choke-hold.

Whilst all new technologies suffer a certain amount of hype, we should be in no doubt that we are on the precipice of an AI-powered revolution that comes about once a generation: what Mustafa Suleyman, of UK-based AI unicorn DeepMind, calls “the coming wave”.

From easing the burden on the NHS from an ageing population, boosting sluggish productivity or solutions to a changing climate, artificial intelligence is a key part of the solution. Certainly, without its application there seems no prospect of ending the addiction to low-wage, unskilled immigration or high public spending that cost us Conservatives dearly at the recent election.

A report titled “Selecting the Best”, published this week by the Adam Smith Institute, lays out how making gains in automation across the economy is essential to being able to reduce our dependence on low-skilled migration and boost incomes.

Forsaking that opportunity could leave us locked into a permanent cycle of higher numbers, lower wages, and the electoral consequences that will follow.

The vast amount of AI research being done in the UK today, and the models and products being developed, could see us holding an ownership stake in what will likely be the most valuable technology on the planet.

And yet, under a fog of uncertainty from Labour, we are precariously close to the UK losing its position as one of the world’s top three destinations for AI investment and research.

The EU has made its choice, with its EU AI Act creating chilling uncertainty that is seeing innovative companies bypass European capitals in the same way that trading routes once simply rerouted themselves around bandit country or silted harbours.

That sense of just how uncompetitive Europe has become seems to have finally dawned even in Paris, explaining the hurried exit of Thierry Breton, arch EU integrationist and one of the commissioners responsible for the EU’s AI Act, after his nomination was pulled last week by President Emmanuel Macron.

For the UK to emulate Brussels – as Labour suggested it would in the King’s Speech – would be a disaster.  In addition to mooted tax raids on wealth creators and interference with the freedoms of employers and employees to freely contract, it doesn’t take the processing power of a supercomputer to predict an irreversible brain drain.

We already have a world-leading framework for AI, created under the previous Conservative government, which enables some of the brightest minds in the industry to work for the British people and with the industry through the AI Safety Institute.

Giving it up would be a slap in the face to the many people, companies, and labs who cooperated with the previous Government to build it only to be cast aside at the first opportunity to ape what is already turning out to be a failed model.

Labour would be wise not to throw this progress away purely to make a point about Brexit or to yield to its union paymasters. Britain would be immeasurably poorer if it is forced to look on, sabotaged by Westminster, as the next industrial revolution passes it by.

Andrew Griffith is the Conservative MP for Arundel and South Downs and shadow secretary of state for science, innovation and technology