Facebook Pushes for Data Portability Legislation Ahead of FTC Hearing

FILE PHOTO: A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen placed on a keyboard in this illustration taken March 25, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
FILE PHOTO: A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen placed on a keyboard in this illustration taken March 25, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
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Facebook Pushes for Data Portability Legislation Ahead of FTC Hearing

FILE PHOTO: A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen placed on a keyboard in this illustration taken March 25, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
FILE PHOTO: A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen placed on a keyboard in this illustration taken March 25, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Facebook Inc on Friday pushed for legislation that makes it easier for users to transfer photos and videos to a rival tech platform, in comments it sent to the Federal Trade Commission ahead of a hearing on the topic on Sept. 22.

Data portability has become a key part of the antitrust debate in the US and Europe.

In April, Facebook allowed users in the US and Canada to transfer photos and videos to Alphabet-owned Google Photos for the first time - a move that is likely to help the company respond to US regulators and lawmakers, who are investigating its competitive practices and allegations it has stifled competition.

“The FTC often issues reports following these workshops ... I think their recommendations should include dedicated portability legislation,” Bijan Madhani, privacy and public policy manager at Facebook told Reuters.

Facebook supports a portability bill already doing the rounds in Congress called the Access Act from Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal and Mark Warner, and Republican senator Josh Hawley. It would require large tech platforms to let their users easily move their data to other services.

The bill is a good first step, Madhani said. Facebook has engaged with the lawmakers on it and will continue working with them, he added.

Facebook is also seeking regulatory guidance, in the form of an independent body or regulator, in answering policy questions and helping them address liability issues tied to portability, Madhani said.

The social media platform is also pressing for more clarity on what kinds of data should be portable and who is responsible for protecting such information as it moves to different services, he noted.



Anthropic Says Looking to Power European Tech with Hiring Push

As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
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Anthropic Says Looking to Power European Tech with Hiring Push

As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File

American AI giant Anthropic aims to boost the European tech ecosystem as it expands on the continent, product chief Mike Krieger told AFP Thursday at the Vivatech trade fair in Paris.

The OpenAI competitor wants to be "the engine behind some of the largest startups of tomorrow... (and) many of them can and should come from Europe", Krieger said.

Tech industry and political leaders have often lamented Europe's failure to capitalize on its research and education strength to build heavyweight local companies -- with many young founders instead leaving to set up shop across the Atlantic.

Krieger's praise for the region's "really strong talent pipeline" chimed with an air of continental tech optimism at Vivatech.

French AI startup Mistral on Wednesday announced a multibillion-dollar tie-up to bring high-powered computing resources from chip behemoth Nvidia to the region.

The semiconductor firm will "increase the amount of AI computing capacity in Europe by a factor of 10" within two years, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang told an audience at the southern Paris convention center.

Among 100 planned continental hires, Anthropic is building up its technical and research strength in Europe, where it has offices in Dublin and non-EU capital London, Krieger said.

Beyond the startups he hopes to boost, many long-standing European companies "have a really strong appetite for transforming themselves with AI", he added, citing luxury giant LVMH, which had a large footprint at Vivatech.

'Safe by design'

Mistral -- founded only in 2023 and far smaller than American industry leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic -- is nevertheless "definitely in the conversation" in the industry, Krieger said.

The French firm recently followed in the footsteps of the US companies by releasing a so-called "reasoning" model able to take on more complex tasks.

"I talk to customers all the time that are maybe using (Anthropic's AI) Claude for some of the long-horizon agentic tasks, but then they've also fine-tuned Mistral for one of their data processing tasks, and I think they can co-exist in that way," Krieger said.

So-called "agentic" AI models -- including the most recent versions of Claude -- work as autonomous or semi-autonomous agents that are able to do work over longer horizons with less human supervision, including by interacting with tools like web browsers and email.

Capabilities displayed by the latest releases have raised fears among some researchers, such as University of Montreal professor and "AI godfather" Yoshua Bengio, that independently acting AI could soon pose a risk to humanity.

Bengio last week launched a non-profit, LawZero, to develop "safe-by-design" AI -- originally a key founding promise of OpenAI and Anthropic.

'Very specific genius'

"A huge part of why I joined Anthropic was because of how seriously they were taking that question" of AI safety, said Krieger, a Brazilian software engineer who co-founded Instagram, which he left in 2018.

Anthropic is still working on measures designed to restrict their AI models' potential to do harm, he added.

But it has yet to release details of its "level 4" AI safety protections foreseen for still more powerful models, after activating ASL (AI Safety Level) 3 to corral the capabilities of May's Claude Opus 4 release.

Developing ASL 4 is "an active part of the work of the company", Krieger said, without giving a potential release date.

With Claude 4 Opus, "we've deployed the mitigations kind of proactively... safe doesn't have to mean slow, but it does mean having to be thoughtful and proactive ahead of time" to make sure safety protections don't impair performance, he added.

Looking to upcoming releases from Anthropic, Krieger said the company's models were on track to match chief executive Dario Amodei's prediction that Anthropic would offer customers access to a "country of geniuses in a data center" by 2026 or 2027 -- within limits.

Anthropic's latest AI models are "genius-level at some very specific things", he said.

"In the coming year... it will continue to spike in particular aspects of things, and still need a lot of human-in-the-loop coordination," he forecast.