The new lobby battlefield
The AI Act is law. Now comes implementation — and every AI company in the world wants to shape it. GovLens data shows that since November 2025, at least 25 organisations have held over 200 meetings with EU officials specifically about artificial intelligence, the GPAI Code of Practice, and the AI Omnibus package.
OpenAI and Google are tied at 18 meetings each. Black Forest Labs — a Freiburg-based image generation startup with a declared budget under €100,000 — secured 15 meetings with 7 unique officials. Mistral AI got 12. Microsoft got 12. The established players and the upstarts are competing for the same officials' time.
The gatekeeper: one official met 9 of 10 major AI companies
Matthieu Delescluse, a Head of Unit in DG Connect, met with 9 out of 10 major AI companies in our dataset — 28 meetings in 6 months. He is the single most-connected official in EU AI policy. Director Lucilla Sioli met 5 companies in 11 meetings. Cabinet member Werner Stengg met 4 in 12 meetings.
This concentration means that a tiny cluster of officials is gatekeeping AI policy for 450 million Europeans. When Anthropic meets Delescluse about the GPAI Code of Practice, and OpenAI meets him the same week, the implementation is being shaped in a series of bilateral conversations that no one else can see.
Budget does not buy access — connections do
DeepL, the German translation company, declares a lobby budget of just €10,000. It secured 9 AI meetings with 5 officials — a rate of 900 meetings per million euros. Black Forest Labs at €100,000 got 15 meetings. Meanwhile, Amazon at €10 million got 9. The data suggests that for AI policy specifically, being a credible technical voice matters more than budget size.
Anthropic — maker of Claude — held 4 AI meetings in 6 months, including with Commissioner Michael McGrath and EVP cabinet members. Their first disclosed EU meeting was a "courtesy visit to introduce the activities of Anthropic" in December 2024. Within 16 months, they were in the room for the GPAI Code of Practice signatory taskforce. Explore the full meeting timelines on GovLens.