In April 2021 EU Commissioners Margarethe Vestager and Thierry Breton presented a proposal for a European legal framework on Artificial Intelligence, or AI. It was celebrated as the first global attempt to establish a regulatory scheme for AI – a technology that, as the Commission observed, would have an enormous impact on the way people live and work in the coming decades.

However, AI is increasingly central to the business models of large tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta (formerly Facebook). Google, in private meetings with the Commission, described itself as an 'AI first company' with 'AI driving all their products.' And so, unsurprisingly, the European Union’s push to regulate has faced intense corporate lobbying attempts at every stage of the policy-making process.

Documents obtained by Corporate Europe Observatory reveal how the EU’s pioneering attempt to regulate artificial intelligence has faced intense lobbying from US tech companies.