Might 26 (Reuters) – OpenAI has no plans to leave Europe, CEO Sam Altman stated on Friday, reversing a threat produced earlier this week to leave the area if it becomes also really hard to comply with upcoming laws on artificial intelligence.

“We are excited to continue to operate right here and of course have no plans to leave,” he stated in a tweet.

The EU is operating on what could be the 1st set of guidelines globally to govern AI and Altman on Wednesday stated the existing draft of the EU AI Act was “more than-regulating.”

Altman’s threat of quitting Europe had drawn criticism from EU business chief Thierry Breton and a host of other lawmakers.

Altman has spent the previous week crisscrossing Europe, meeting major politicians in France, Spain, Poland, Germany and the UK to talk about the future of AI, and progress of ChatGPT.

He named his tour a “quite productive week of conversations in Europe about how to very best regulate AI!”

AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft (MSFT.O), has made new possibilities about AI and fears about its prospective have provoked excitement and alarm – and brought it into conflict with regulators.

OpenAI 1st clashed with regulators in March, when Italian information regulator Garante shut the app down domestically, accusing OpenAI of flouting European privacy guidelines. ChatGPT came back on-line soon after the corporation instituted new privacy measures for customers.

OpenAI on Thursday stated it will award ten equal grants from a fund of $1 million for experiments to identify how AI computer software must be governed and Altman named these grants as “how to democratically determine on the behavior of AI systems”

Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru and Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm Editing by Arun Koyyur

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Supantha Mukherjee

Thomson Reuters

Supantha leads the European Technologies and Telecoms coverage, with a unique concentrate on emerging technologies such as AI and 5G. He has been a journalist for about 18 years. He joined Reuters in 2006 and has covered a wide variety of beats ranging from economic sector to technologies. He is primarily based in Stockholm, Sweden.