NEW DELHI — Don’t be like Europe. 

That was the brutal message delivered by attendees of the 2026 global artificial intelligence summit throughout a week-long jamboree of speeches, parties and events across New Delhi.

Takedowns from attendees ranging from the American representative at the summit to multiple lobbyists and national officials provided stark evidence of how far Europe has fallen in the eyes of the global artificial intelligence community in just a few years.

When the first AI safety summit took place in the U.K. in 2023, Europe was drafting its global first AI law and the bloc was a leading voice in conversations on how to shepherd the technology. This time around, the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act was attacked as an example of how not to do it.

“The atmosphere in the EU needs to change and be more focused on innovation, less focused on governance and less focused on doomerism,” said Sriram Krishnan, the White House senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence, at a side event on Wednesday.

The EU law is “not really conducive to an entrepreneur who wants to build basic technology,” Krishnan added. 

Multiple industry representatives offered a bleak assessment. “They’ve shot themselves in the foot with the AI Act,” said Amanda Brock, CEO of Open UK, which advocates open-source technology in artificial intelligence. 

Arguing that the EU moved too fast, too early with its law, Brock said: “You can’t make regulations around something you don’t understand and expect it to be successful.”

Since the EU passed its law in 2024, few countries have followed suit. India headed into the summit announcing a “light touch” governance system — a wait-and-see approach that acts only on specific harms such as deepfakes — that is emblematic of the path many countries are taking.

The EU, meanwhile, has struggled to harmonize its ambitions both to be a global regulator and to attract investment. In recent months EU authorities have been threading the needle to implement the bloc’s flagship AI law while simultaneously rolling back safety provisions after complaints from European companies that the law was too burdensome.

At the last summit in Paris, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was a headline speaker.

In a sign of the times, the Commission’s on-stage appearance at this year’s weeklong New Delhi summit is scheduled for Friday afternoon, when many international attendees will already have departed.

Doomerism

The bloc has struggled to find its footing at a gathering where attendees were far more focused on striking deals to stay competitive in a global race than on keeping the technology in check. 

With no headline speech, the Commission’s AI Office will host two panels on Friday. The first is on its work on a voluntary set of rules for the most complex and advanced AI models, such as OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini.

The second is on “innovative AI solutions,” which will outline the Commission’s plans to build factories on the continent to ensure sovereign compute power.

“For Europe, leadership in AI means combining investment, scale and responsible governance,” said EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen in remarks shared before the summit. She is one of a handful of EU officials attending in Delhi.

Virkkunen declined to respond publicly to Krishnan’s remarks.

Italian MEP Brando Benifei of the Socialists and Democrats group, who is also present in New Delhi, dismissed the U.S. position as “quite isolated” while admitting “there’s a different appetite for levels of regulation” across the world.  

One area where the EU may get traction is with its voluntary guidelines advising companies on how they should file risk assessments, said Amber Sinha, executive director of digital rights group EDRi. “But I don’t see a lot of convergence besides from that.”

French President Emmanuel Macron — one of the few European leaders to attend this year — failed to mount a convincing defense of the AI Act in his Thursday keynote speech as he addressed the criticism.

“Europe is not blindly focused on regulation,” Macron said. 

Other attendees argued that the path Brussels has chosen is still the right one, while admitting the EU has struggled to sell its rules as the global standard.  

“In the current environment of global digital technologies, it’s hard for one region, when things are so polarized, to really set those standards,” said Mark Surman, president of Mozilla, which advocates an open internet and trustworthy AI.

The EU’s AI Act as well as its GDPR data protection rules are “the right types of standards” but “they’re really facing an uphill battle,” Surman said.

Gabriel Gavin contributed reporting.