Goes to show that when an industry does not self-regulate, it gets over-regulated, which often disproportionately benefits incumbents, which incentivizes future lack of self regulation.
It's more accurate to say that when an industry doesn't self-regulate, the EU over-regulates and shoots themselves in the face. The US and China will race even further out ahead accordingly.
In the US I can easily unleash a large user data hungry AI at will, experimenting all day long with anything and everything I can come up with. I can screw with people's data in countless ways, without their permission. While this haven exists, I can rapidly learn and come up with technology and services that tech companies in the EU can't risk attempting and won't bother to contemplate.
To the point: you can still push every edge of the AI revolution in the US and China, to see what's there. That revolution is heavily built on user data. In the EU, you're in a straight-jacket at the very beginning of the revolution (one that is guaranteed to only get tighter), many years before we've even seriously begun experimenting with the fertile soil. They're fucked, the world will be dominated by AI that comes out of either the US or China, or both.