Europe, US closer than they look on tech rules, says EU tech chief

Ah, marvellous. EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen has looked across the Atlantic, counted "hundreds of state-level AI rules" in the United States, and declared that Europe and America are "closer than they look" on tech regulation. Because nothing says transatlantic convergence like a few hundred jurisdictions each hand-crafting their own incompatible version of "responsible AI." One can already picture the compliance officer's job description: maintain a colour-coded spreadsheet, weep quietly, and hope the spreadsheet does not become a criminal offence in the one state you forgot to refresh.

The EU, meanwhile, is now armed with the enforcement powers attached to the AI Act, which — according to the Commission's own calendar — took effect in August. Congratulations are due. The world's boldest attempt at formal AI regulation has officially acquired teeth, presumably just in time to bite the ankle of a model that has already left the room, gone abroad, and set up shop somewhere even more permissive. "Closer than they look" is doing heroic work when one side is a coherent if sclerotic Brussels bureaucracy and the other is a patchwork of state rules that can be rewritten the moment a trade association files an objection.

Still, credit where credit is due: both sides of the Atlantic are now generating regulatory paperwork at a genuinely impressive rate. That is the real convergence — not of rules, but of the sublime confidence that any of this will keep up with the models. Virkkunen is right in the only way that matters: from the distance of a boardroom slide deck, a European regulation and an American one look almost identical, in the way two different car crashes look almost identical to an astronaut in orbit. The enforcement powers arrived in August. The laws are here. The one thing missing is the rest of the AI, and a consensus on what exactly is being enforced. Ideally over a pint, if the bar has cleared its own AI compliance audit.