Seven European chief executives published a joint op-ed in Handelsblatt and Corriere della Sera on Tuesday 5 May after meeting Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels1. The signatories were the Dutch chip-tool maker ASML, Airbus, Ericsson, Mistral AI, Nokia, the German enterprise software firm SAP and Siemens. The headline line: "More than three years after the ChatGPT moment, Europe is still debating regulation, while others have long shifted focus to scaling AI in physical systems and robotics." The asks are reduced and simplified AI rules, looser merger control to allow European scale, industrial-policy support, and tariff-style protection from subsidised rivals.
Mistral AI's signature carries the load. France's flagship sovereign AI company, fresh from the largest AI debt raise in Europe and a French Ministry of Defence framework agreement that requires French-only infrastructure deployment, signed a deregulation letter three weeks before the package the rest of Brussels is preparing. Arthur Mensch, Mistral's chief executive, had earlier proposed a 1 to 1.5 percent EU AI levy for training-data legal certainty; the op-ed asks for less rule-making, not for the levy. The industrial constituency the package is supposedly being built for has gone on the record, in print, in the Commission's own pre-adoption window.
Christophe Fouquet, ASML's chief executive, gives the letter a financial subtext. China fell to 19 percent of system sales in Q1 2026 from 36 percent the previous quarter; Fouquet told analysts the 2026 guidance "accommodates potential outcomes of ongoing discussions around export controls"2. A bipartisan US bill, the MATCH Act, introduced on 2 April 2026, would ban all Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) lithography sales to Chinese chipmakers if it passes. ASML's research and development cross-subsidy, which has historically funded Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) development through DUV revenue from China, is being narrowed by Washington while Brussels has no comparable instrument to replace it. The op-ed's complaint about industrial-policy support is, in ASML's case, a complaint about a missing one.
