Europe’s top antitrust regulator confronts Big Tech CEOs over AI market power

Europe is taking its AI fight straight to the offices of the people running the biggest tech companies in the world.

Teresa Ribera, the EU’s antitrust chief, is set to meet Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday in San Francisco, a European Commission agenda item showed.

The trip runs for a week in the United States and does not stop there. Ribera is also due to meet Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Wednesday, and she is scheduled to speak at an American Bar Association conference on Friday.

This comes after Ribera said this month that she is examining the full AI stack.That includes AI chatbots, the data used to train them, and the cloud computing infrastructure behind them.

She has already opened many investigations into Google and Meta business practices, while the European Commission has warned that powerful companies may push their own AI services on their own platforms and shut out rivals.

Europe digs deeper into American chatbots, data, and cloud power

The European Commission is in charge of enforcing competition law for every part of the EU, and it believes that major risks are coming from Big Tech companies giving preference to their own AI products across the stack.

OpenAI, Nvidia, Meta, and Google have poured billions into AI infrastructure as demand keeps rising. That has turned computing capacity into a hard business weapon.

Ribera’s meetings in San Francisco are happening as Europe tries to decide whether this new wave of power is already becoming too concentrated.

At the same time, there is another fight going on between Brussels and Washington over the EU’s digital rules. Senior EU lawmakers said Tuesday that the United States should stop trying to change those laws.

German lawmaker Andreas Schwab told POLITICO, “There is a certain level of tiredness in Brussels when it comes to responding to these talking points from Washington.”

EU lawmakers push back as Washington attacks Europe’s digital rules and trade talks continue

Andreas was answering comments from Andrew Puzder, the U.S. ambassador to the EU, who called for fresh political talks on the EU’s digital rulebooks.

In an interview on Monday, Puzder said he hoped a vote this week on an EU-U.S. trade deal in the European Parliament would help open talks on easing digital rules.

But Italian socialist lawmaker Brando Benifei said, “I don’t see any political appetite in the European Parliament but not even in Council for scaling back our digital legislation dealing with malicious content, manipulation or unfair treatment of startups and consumers alike.”

The U.S. administration has repeatedly pushed against the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, saying they unfairly target American companies. The EU has rejected that claim and said it will not back down.

Andreas said, “Whether it is Andrew Puzder today or others before him, the script remains the same: They characterize European law as an ‘attack’ while ignoring that these rules were debated democratically over several years and made for the benefit of consumers and companies, including American companies.”

He also said the Digital Markets Act is “not an opening bid in a trade negotiation; it is a settled legal reality.”

The European Parliament is due to vote on Thursday on whether to move forward the 2025 transatlantic trade deal agreed by the EU and the U.S. On Tuesday, Jamie Raskin, a top U.S. Democrat, told members of the Internal Market Committee that attacks on the EU’s digital rules are tied to a MAGA-aligned agenda.

Raskin said the Trump administration “works hard to promote the MAGA movement in Europe under the guise of defending free speech,” while cracking down on free speech at home.

In February, the House Judiciary Committee, led by Jim Jordan, called the DSA a “foreign censorship tool” and named nearly 30 EU officials involved in enforcing it.

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