So let me get this straight. You think that Europe "shot itself in the dick" by making it harder to deploy AI that:

- manipulates, including subliminally (hope you'll like your subliminal Ads mixed into your LLM output)

- profiling for social scoring

- automated thread labeling as an individual, with no human supervision

- facetracking databases

- emotional and "well-being" monitoring at work or in schools

- + many other kinds of surveillance tools.

I hope you are joking.

edit:

For context this was a snippet of prohibited use, which the fines listed on Wikipedia (theoretically apply to), https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/5/

You don't compete with anthrophopic from the basement. For that you need either a shit loads of money, or a government which are not afraid of getting very very involved.

There is a lot of Europeans working on AI, it's just that a lot of them work for American companies. Because of money.

Possibly yes but let me remember you that France, Italy Germany were against the AI act, so here something very odd is happening, that the EU funding nations are getting marginalized by the countries they welcomed on key topics for our future, and I believe corruption could be a big part of what is happening, both internal to those three countries and at an even more alarming rate in other countries.

Way more important than this act are the police raids. Someone used your SaaS to send phishing (see today's front page HN)? They'll just take all your servers away. Goodbye business. Unless they think the general public would riot, so established companies are okay. You can't build a castle on a foundation of quicksand.

Well , there isn’t also the opposite take from TechCrunch where they say: Why Paris may be the most important AI city outside Silicon Valley. [0]

While the EU loves its regulation, I still feel it’s too early to write it down in the AI race. It will not replace Anthropic or OpenAI any time soon, but even Google and Meta fail to do that.

If AI continue to grow and expand, there is enough space for many more unicorns.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/why-paris-may-be-the-most-...

Did you read even a summary of the AI Act?

The gist of it is very simple - depending on the risk of what you're doing with AI, you have to document why it did what it did, and be able to explain it; or you can't use it at all. So if you're using AI for mass surveillance, you can't; if you're using it for treating loan applications you need to be able to explain why it approved/denied; if it's a customer service chatbot, do whatever, nobody cares.

Not only is burden of the legislation fairly low (and a lot of it hasn't come into force yet), it is extremely reasonable. No, sorry, we don't want a UnitedHealthcare using a broken algorithm on purpose to deny as much care as possible and hiding behind computer says no.

It's yet another time when EU is killing our own possibilities to build real competition to US or Chinese tech.

And yet another time they will be thinking aloud in few year "what happened that we are fully dependent on USA?"

So you're saying AI models should be allowed to freely "manipulate human behavior"?