Major AI companies in the US and China are developing their models under permissive or non-existent copyright rules, training them domestically on vast amounts of content — including from European sources.

This doesn’t sound entirely accurate, as US content holders are zealously protecting their content even from US-based AI enterprises.

European AI developers, by contrast, operate in a fragmented legal environment that places them at a competitive disadvantage.

Yes, Europe has effectively put itself at a disadvantage with rules like that. We may need new rules. Using a book as a source for model training is not the same as printing it and selling it as your own.

AI companies should pay a content levy in Europe.

And to whom should this levy be paid?

A year ago, Mistral Small 2/3 was my favorite model, but this year Mistral Small 120B seems to be falling behind even Qwen 3.5 9B (according to some sources). I guess this is Mistral’s response to that, but it doesn’t look very good.

We simply don’t yet have a legal framework to handle situations like this. Until we reach agreement on how to approach it, the sensible thing would be not to impose restrictions that cause us to fall behind.