Dutch prince ‘genuinely concerned’ about European AI rules, sends ‘warning to US and China’

Europe is taking a strong stance on regulating artificial intelligence (AI), introducing comprehensive rules to ensure the responsible development and use of the technology. While the regulations aim to address the potential dangers of AI, Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands said the approach could be the reason the region falls behind the US and China in AI development.

“Our ambitions are clearly limited to being good regulators,” Constantijn said in an interview with CNBC on the sidelines of the Money 20/20 fintech conference recently held in Amsterdam.

“We saw it in the data space (with GDPR), we saw it now in the platform space and now in the AI ​​space,” added Constantijn, who is the third and youngest son of former Dutch Queen Beatrix.

European Union (EU) regulators have taken a tough approach to artificial intelligence to curb concerns about bias, discrimination and privacy.

Europe is focusing more on regulating artificial intelligence
Prince Constantijn expressed “really concerned” that Europe had focused more on regulating artificial intelligence than on trying to become an innovation leader.

“It’s good to have guardrails. We want to ensure market transparency, predictability and so on. However, it is very difficult to do this in such a rapidly changing space,” he said.

“There is a big risk of misidentification and, as we saw with genetically modified organisms, it has not stopped development. It has simply stopped Europe from developing it and now we are consumers of the product, not producers who can influence the development of the market,” he added.

According to Constantijn, Europe is making it “quite difficult” to innovate in the field of artificial intelligence due to “significant data constraints.”

He noted that the U.S. market is a “much larger and unified market” with more free-flowing capital, Constantijn said. On those counts, he added, “Europe is doing quite poorly.”

“I think we do well in terms of talent. We do well in terms of technology itself,” he said.

Moreover, when it comes to creating AI-powered applications, “Europe will definitely be competitive,” Constantijn noted.