Europe’s AI translation industry told it risks reputation by partnering with US firms

DeepL said AWS would not have access to its paying customers’ data, either for viewing its content or training Amazon’s algorithms, and said the partnership was vital to scale up its offering internationally. Photograph: Amazon Web Services

AI companies in Europe risk losing their world-leading status in the field of machine translation, industry figures have said, after the decision by one of the continent’s leading startups to partner with Amazon’s cloud computing division provoked alarm.

While businesses in the EU have generally lagged behind the US and China in AI adoption, a small group of European companies have cornered the global market for high-quality machine translations for professional use.