12:56 PM EDT, 08/23/2024 (MT Newswires) -- The chief executives of Meta Platforms ( META ) and Spotify Technology ( SPOT ) said Friday that European Union regulation of artificial intelligence "is hampering innovation and holding back developers."

"Regulating against known harms is necessary, but pre-emptive regulation of theoretical harms for nascent technologies such as open-source AI will stifle innovation," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify ( SPOT ) CEO Daniel Ek said in a joint statement posted on their respective websites.

The two CEOs took aim at what they described as the "uneven application" of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which they said was meant to harmonize the use and flow of data.

"But instead EU privacy regulators are creating delays... and are unable to agree among themselves on how the law should apply," the CEOs said. "For example, Meta has been told to delay training its models on content shared publicly by adults on Facebook and Instagram -- not because any law has been violated but because regulators haven't agreed on how to proceed."

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