The U.S. federal agenda is signaling a deregulatory push on Artificial Intelligence, but the European Union is moving ahead with enforcement of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, and major model providers are taking steps to comply. Multiple developers, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Cohere, Amazon, Google, Anthropic and Mistral AI, signed the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, or GPAI, which aims to reduce administrative burdens and give companies greater legal certainty when meeting the act´s requirements. Georgetown research fellow Mia Hoffman noted the act imposes specific constraints, such as model evaluations and risk assessments, while leaving limited detail on implementation, and said the GPAI helps providers understand expectations under the law.
Because companies typically release the same models across markets, compliance measures adopted to enter the European market will likely affect what consumers see in the United States. Developers could theoretically create different model versions for different regions, but Hoffman and the article point out that this is unlikely for the largest and most expensive models given training costs, citing examples such as OpenAI´s GPT-5 and xAI´s Grok 4. Not all firms embraced the GPAI. Meta has remained a notable holdout, arguing the code introduces legal uncertainties and goes beyond the EU act. By contrast, Elon Musk´s xAI signed the GPAI´s Safety and Security Chapter while pursuing other paths to meet the act´s transparency and copyright obligations. Ayesha Bhatti of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said the GPAI is only one compliance route and warned that the cost of compliance could discourage experimentation with new AI-powered business models.
The regulatory landscape is also fragmented domestically. U.S. companies face a growing patchwork of state-level Artificial Intelligence laws that could complicate a federal deregulatory approach. OpenAI has sought alignment by asking California governor Gavin Newsom to harmonize state rules with the GPAI to ease compliance. A proposed moratorium on state AI laws included in recent federal spending legislation did not pass. The article concludes that, despite U.S. deregulatory aims, firms that want access to the European market will be bound by the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, and those measures will in practice shape model behavior and protections encountered by U.S. consumers.
