OpenAI has no intentions to leave Europe, states CEO Sam Altman

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated on Friday that the company has no intentions to leave Europe, reversing a warning made earlier this week to leave the continent if it becomes too difficult to comply with forthcoming artificial intelligence rules.

The EU is working on what may be the world’s first set of laws governing AI, and Altman warned on Wednesday that the present draught of the EU AI Act is “over-regulating.”

“We are excited to continue to operate here and of course have no plans to leave,” Altman said in a tweet on Friday.

His threat of quitting Europe had drawn criticism from EU industry chief Thierry Breton and a host of other lawmakers.

Altman has spent the past week crisscrossing Europe, meeting top politicians in France, Spain, Poland, Germany and Britain to discuss the future of AI and the progress of ChatGPT.

He called his tour a "very productive week of conversations in Europe about how to best regulate AI!"

OpenAI had faced criticism for not disclosing training data for its latest AI model GPT-4. The company had cited a "competitive landscape and safety implications" for not disclosing the details.

While debating the AI Act draft, EU lawmakers added new proposals that would force any company using generative tools, like ChatGPT, to disclose copyrighted material used to train its systems.

"These provisions relate mainly to transparency, which ensures the AI and the company building it are trustworthy," Dragos Tudorache, a Romanian member of the European Parliament who is leading the drafting of EU proposals, told Reuters on Thursday.

"I don't see a reason why any company would shy away from transparency."

Clash with regulators

EU parliamentarians agreed on the draft of the act earlier this month. Member states, the European Commission and Parliament will thrash out the final details of the bill later this year.

AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft, has created new possibilities around AI and fears around its potential have provoked excitement and alarm – and brought it into conflict with regulators.

OpenAI first clashed with regulators in March, when Italian data regulator Garante shut the app down domestically, accusing OpenAI of flouting European privacy rules. ChatGPT came back online after the company instituted new privacy measures for users.

OpenAI on Thursday said it will award 10 equal grants from a fund of $1 million for experiments to determine how AI software should be governed and Altman called those grants "how to democratically decide on the behaviour of AI systems".

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