The head of Germany's answer to DOGE wants to scale back regulation and 'open up the gates' (www.businessinsider.com)

At the WELT AI Summit in Berlin, Germany’s new federal minister for digital transformation, Karsten Wildberger, urged a rapid rollback of regulatory friction to let domestic tech firms “innovate much, much faster.” A former tech executive now charged with cutting red tape, Wildberger told technologists and regulators that Germany should “open up the gates,” stop legislating AI into stagnation, and pivot from trying to compete at the foundation‑model level toward building scalable products and services that sit on top of base models. The message matters because it challenges the practical effects of the EU’s AI Act — a risk‑based rulebook that bans social scoring, tightly restricts “high‑risk” domains (health, policing, hiring) and demands broad transparency. Wildberger argues those rules are imposing compliance costs that push startups and innovation offshore. Technically, his focus shifts policy priorities from core model R&D to application‑layer engineering, deployment, financing and go‑to‑market scaling: things like integrating base models into industry workflows, securing data and compute, and lowering governance burdens for product teams. If adopted, his pragmatist approach could accelerate commercialization and industrial AI adoption in Germany — but it also frames an unavoidable trade‑off between faster deployment and maintaining the safeguards the EU law seeks to guarantee.