Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek have joined forces to express displeasure with the European Union’s regulations on artificial intelligence, claiming they are suppressing innovation. That is the opposite of the stated goals of EU lawmakers in passing the regulations. In a joint statement first published in The Economist and then on the Meta and Spotify websites Friday, the duo took aim at alleged EU obstruction to the development of open source AI, suggesting that Europe’s “fragmented regulatory structure, riddled with inconsistent implementation, is hampering innovation and holding back developers.”

“A key opportunity for European organizations is through open-source AI — models whose weights are released publicly with a permissive license,” the joint statement reads. “This ensures power isn’t concentrated among a few large players and, as with the Internet before it, creates a level playing field.”

Zuckerberg asserts that “Meta open-sources many of its AI technologies, including its state-of-the-art Llama large language models.”

This argument is made as the Open Source Initiative, a Palo Alto-based non-profit, published a definition of open source AI that makes clear many Big Tech players, Meta included, are loosely using the term as applied to AI.

“Many companies claim their AI models are open source without really being open at all, such as Meta’s Llama 3.1,” ZDNet writes.

In the statement, Meta “points out that it has been prevented from being able to train its AI models on public data across Facebook and Instagram because regulators haven’t crafted legislation to address how this should be handled as of yet,” explains TechCrunch.

In July, it was reported that Meta would withhold Llama models in the EU due to a privacy dispute with regulators and what it feels is a lack of clarity over model training.

“Delaying the use of data that is routinely used in other regions means the most powerful AI models won’t reflect the collective knowledge, culture, and languages of Europe — and Europeans won’t get to use the latest AI products,” the two CEOs wrote last week.

According to The Next Web, Austrian non-profit NYOB wrote in June that Meta could train models on European citizen data “if it would just bother to ask people to agree, but it seems Meta is doing everything it can to never get opt-in consent for any processing.”

As for the participation of Spofity and Ek, not known for training foundation models, TechCrunch writes that “reading between the lines, it’s not a stretch to assume that Spotify would like to use Meta’s AI technology to improve its products but is similarly impacted by the lack of clarity around AI regulations in the EU.”