AI companies in Europe risk losing their world-leading status in the field of machine translation, industry figures have said, after the decision by one of the continent’s leading startups to partner with Amazon’s cloud computing division provoked alarm.

While businesses in the EU have generally lagged behind the US and China in AI adoption, a small group of European companies have cornered the global market for high-quality machine translations for professional use.

The biggest success story is Cologne-headquartered DeepL, an online translator that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments . Used by governments, courts and half of the Fortune 500 list of highest-earning US companies, last year it was reported to have recorded revenues of $185.2m .…