Meta AI training will be challenged at Europe’s highest court, says data protection chief

AI training should be stopped

Thomas Fuchs, data protection commissioner for Hamburg, who supported the injunction, told Computer Weekly his office has not dropped its belief that the US giant’s AI training should be stopped, even though it conceded after the Cologne ruling and agreed with other EU regulators to let it proceed.

“The urgent injunction was denied, but it doesn’t mean that the ruling has to be the same at the end of the whole legislative process,” he said. “So, this is the start. At the end, it will be decided by the European Court of Justice, I’m quite sure.” 

The Hamburg commissioner dropped his proceedings to use emergency powers he has under Article 66 of Europe’s GDPR data protection law to halt Meta’s training, after the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, which controls Europe’s regulatory oversight of Meta, decided the US firm had a legitimate interest to proceed under EU law, on condition that it takes strict measures to protect people’s privacy.

The urgent injunction [to halt Meta AI training] was denied, but it doesn’t mean that the ruling has to be the same at the end of the whole legislative process

Fuchs does not believe, as Meta and a lobby of EU AI firms claimed in April, that Europe’s confused AI regulation is holding its industry back.

The court ruling and regulatory decisions made no difference to the legal standing of EU AI firms because it concerned Meta “very precisely”, said Fuchs. But it did give EU firms a “green light” to do their own AI training on public posts.

“You could say, if even Meta can base AI model training with personal data on legitimate interest, then probably for a lot of other companies that will be suitable as well,” said Fuchs.

In a statement he wrote before the court hearing in May, Semjon Rens, Meta’s public policy director for Germanic countries, cited Mario Draghi, the former Italian premiere whose report on Europe’s flagging industries has become a blueprint for urgent European Commission reforms. Draghi said Europe’s AI firms had been impaired by a confusion of burdensome regulation.

Terminating Meta’s AI training would weaken Germany’s AI industry, preventing firms from building AI applications using a Llama AI that had gained German cultural, historic and linguistic nuance from EU data, he said. The alternative, he implied, was German companies running Anglo-AI. It would also fragment Europe’s single market, offending another Draghi dictum, he said.

EU behind

EU regulation has delayed Meta’s EU roll-out of its most advanced Llama model by between six and 18 months, and limited its capabilities, while corporations in the US and India are already using it, said Rens.

The European Commission’s agenda is meanwhile dominated by urgent efforts to improve EU competitiveness, and to catch up with AI advances in other countries, which it realised had left it far behind even before its regulatory machine stalled Llama’s training and subsequent roll-out last summer.

Professor Ivan Yamschikov, co-founder of Pleias, an EU AI firm that built the multilingual Common Corpus – the world’s largest collection of open data for AI training – said the decisions would boost EU industry by increasing inward investment from US firms that now have the freedom to operate on the same terms as they do in the US.

EU firms would, as Meta claimed, gain by utilising Llama models trained on EU data. But it is also a “green flag” for European innovators to proceed even without US money or technology, he said.

I’m very happy to see that the focus in Brussels has changed from regulation to enabling growth and innovation

“If even Meta can base AI model training with personal data on legitimate interest, that will probably be suitable for a lot of other companies as well,” added Yamschikov.

“It’s what a common-sense regulator should do – balance the interests of business, innovation and society at large. I believe in growth rather than in hindrance,” he said.

Peter Sarlin, CEO of SiloAI, one of Europe’s largest AI firms, said: “I’m very happy to see that the focus in Brussels has changed from regulation to enabling growth and innovation.”

He applauded the commission’s Draghi-inspired simplification agenda to cut digital regulation. But he said it was “crucial” that it address barriers facing EU entrepreneurs trying to scale their firms – referring to another Draghi diagnosis that fragmented capital markets left firms gasping for growth capital. The Finnish AI firm accelerated its growth by selling to US chip giant AMD last year.

The general counsel at another of Europe’s largest AI firms, who asked not to be named, said regulation was damaging EU industry.

“Regulatory uncertainty, under GDPR or the AI Act, is one of the major threats to European innovation,” he said.

“The Americans, oftentimes, just go. If it’s a grey area, they ask for forgiveness later. We don’t even want to be put in a situation where we have to ask for forgiveness. We just don’t do it,” he added.

This explains why US hyperscale cloud computing firms got so big and Europe’s remained so small, he said. The same is happening now to EU AI firms, he said, suggesting there will never be an EU AI as big as GPT-5 or Llama 4.

The Meta decision is good news for Europe’s AI industry and shows regulators are embracing innovation, according to Gretchen Scott, a lawyer with Goodwin Law. But its legal justification will remain uncertain, she said, “until we get something like an ECJ decision”.

“This ultimately can only get resolved through the top court,” said Scott. “GDPR does not deal with these kinds of issues, even though the commission and regulators believe it [does]”.

Instead, while US AI regulation amounted to “train away”, EU firms shouldered strict regulatory costs and delays. Still, it has not stopped them from training AI models.

Christine Steffen, legal counsel for Verbraucherzentrale NRW, the German consumer rights authority that filed the emergency injunction to stop Meta’s training in May, said it was considering whether to continue to pursue the main case, assessing the legal arguments.

NOYB, the German rights group headed by famous privacy campaigner Max Schrems, which is also mounting legal proceedings against Meta, sent letters demanding that data protection commissioners across Europe halt Meta’s training, as Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth told a San Francisco conference in June that its Ray Ban AI glasses vindicated its investments in AI fed with contextual data.

“Now that you realise there’s going to be a potentially super-intelligent assistant operating there, you want it to have all the context on what you’ve heard, what you’ve seen, what you’re doing – so it can help you the most,” he said.

It is a make-or-break year for Meta and other tech firms bringing consumer AI devices to market, said Bosworth.

Meta was not prepared to comment.