The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has spent the last month touring world capitals where, at talks to sold-out crowds and in meetings with heads of governments, he has repeatedly spoken of the need for global AI regulation.

But behind the scenes, OpenAI has lobbied for significant elements of the most comprehensive AI legislation in the world—the E.U.’s AI Act—to be watered down in ways that would reduce the regulatory burden on the company, according to documents about OpenAI’s engagement with E.U. officials obtained by TIME from the European Commission via freedom of information requests.

In several cases, OpenAI proposed amendments that were later made to the final text of the E.U. law—which was approved by the European Parliament on June 14, and will now proceed to a final round of negotiations before being finalized as soon as January.

Read More: The A to Z of Artificial Intelligence

In 2022, OpenAI repeatedly argued to European officials that the forthcoming AI Act should not consider its general purpose AI systems—including GPT-3, the precursor to ChatGPT, and the image generator Dall-E 2—to be “high risk,” a designation that would subject them to stringent legal requirements including transparency, traceability, and human oversight.

That argument brought OpenAI in line with Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion into the AI lab, and Google, both of which have previously lobbied E.U. officials in favor of loosening the Act’s regulatory burden on large AI providers. Both companies have argued that the burden for complying with the Act’s most stringent requirements should be on companies that explicitly set out to apply an AI to a high risk use case—not on the (often larger) companies that build general purpose AI systems.

“By itself, GPT-3 is not a high-risk system,” said OpenAI in a previously unpublished seven-page document that it sent to E.U. Commission and Council officials in September 2022, titled OpenAI White Paper on the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act. “But [it] possesses capabilities that can potentially be employed in high risk use cases.”

TIME is publishing the White Paper in full alongside this story.

These lobbying efforts by OpenAI in Europe have not previously been reported, though Altman has recently become more vocal about the legislation. In May, he told reporters in London that OpenAI could decide to “cease operating” in Europe if it deemed itself unable to comply with the regulation, of which he said he had “a lot” of criticisms. He later walked back the warning, saying his company had no plans to leave and intends to cooperate with the E.U.

Still, OpenAI’s lobbying effort appears to have been a success: the final draft of the Act approved by E.U. lawmakers did not contain wording pres