ISTANBUL

A US official on Tuesday called Europe's handling of artificial intelligence (AI) a "model of fear and overregulation," urging Asian countries to work with the US instead.

"I want to recognize that each of the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) economies has a choice before it: You can follow the European model of fear and overregulation, and be inevitably left behind, succumbing to stasis ... Or you can take our offered handshake and make a deal," said Michael Kratsios, policy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, as cited by South Korea’s Yonhap News.

"The next trailblazing breakthroughs will be made with and on American technology, and to fully harness them, you will want America's AI infrastructure already in place," Kratsios told a digital forum on the sidelines of an APEC digital and AI ministerial meeting in Incheon, near the capital Seoul.

Kratsios said the technological progress should be "found in political freedom and independence," rather than "global governance and technocratic control."

APEC governments "seek to carefully steward your people's sensitive data, and so cannot always employ a closed proprietary model," he added.

"The best open-source and open-weight models may become industry standard setters. We are therefore taking concrete steps to enable and empower their developers," Kratsios said.