BRUSSELS, July 18 (Reuters) - Microsoft ( MSFT ) will

likely sign the European Union's code of practice to help

companies comply with the bloc's landmark artificial

intelligence rules, its president told Reuters on Friday, while

Meta Platforms ( META ) rebuffed the guidelines.

Drawn up by 13 independent experts, the voluntary code of

practice aims to provide legal certainty to signatories. They

will have to publish summaries of the content used to train

their general-purpose AI models and put in place a policy to

comply with EU copyright law.

The code is part of the AI Act which came into force in June

2024 and will apply to Google owner Alphabet, Facebook

owner Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and thousands of

companies.

"I think it's likely we will sign. We need to read the

documents," Microsoft ( MSFT ) President Brad Smith told Reuters.

"Our goal is to find a way to be supportive and at the same

time one of the things we really welcome is the direct

engagement by the AI Office with industry," he said, referring

to the EU's regulatory body for AI.

Meta reiterated its criticism of the code.

"Meta won't be signing it. This code introduces a number of

legal uncertainties for model developers, as well as measures

which go far beyond the scope of the AI Act," Meta's chief

global affairs officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post on

LinkedIn on Friday.

The U.S. social media giant has the same concerns as a group

of 45 European companies, he said.

"We share concerns raised by these businesses that this

over-reach will throttle the development and deployment of

frontier AI models in Europe, and stunt European companies

looking to build businesses on top of them," Kaplan said.

OpenAI and Mistral have signed the code.