Nick Clegg, President of Global Affairs at Meta, has described the EU's regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) as fragmented.
Speaking at the US Ambassador's Residence in Dublin, Mr Clegg said that it was important to get the regulatory environment right, but that it is not going too well in the EU right now.
"There's a lot of fighting, yesterday's battles," Mr Clegg said.
"They're trying to micromanage a technology which is evolving very fast."
Mr Clegg said that in the context of the EU single market, AI regulation was almost like going in reverse and was fragmenting, with member states with different data protection authorities doing different things.
In July, Meta has said it would withhold the roll out of future 'multimodal' AI models in the EU over what it described as the "unpredictable nature" of the European regulatory environment.
Multimodal AI models are capable of processing data across video, audio, images and text on a variety of devices.
In June, Meta announced that it was pausing plans to use personal data to train AI models after concerns were raised by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC).
Privacy campaigners had complained about Meta's plans amid fears that they may be in breach of EU privacy rules.
The company has described regulatory barriers as a step backwards for European innovation and competition in AI development.
In September, the DPC opened an inquiry into whether Google had complied with EU privacy laws in the development of one of its artificial intelligence models.
Also that month, a High Court dispute between X, formerly Twitter, and the DPC over the use of personal data to train AI systems was resolved.
