Emmanuel Macron has warned that landmark EU legislation designed to tackle the development of artificial intelligence risks hampering European tech companies compared to rivals in the US, UK and China, setting the stage for a new battle over regulation over the emerging technology.

Addressing an audience in Toulouse on Monday, the French president attacked the new Artificial Intelligence Act agreed last Friday, saying: “We can decide to regulate much faster and much stronger than our major competitors. But we will regulate things that we will no longer produce or invent. This is never a good idea.”

Macron said he was concerned that the new law means the EU will enforce the world’s toughest regime on so-called foundational models, the technology that underpins generative AI products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can churn out quantities of humanlike words, images and code in seconds.