EU Reaches Deal On Comprehensive Regulation of AI

"BRUSSELS -- European lawmakers reached a political deal late Friday for regulating artificial intelligence, marking a big step toward establishing a comprehensive AI law.

Previous European Union tech regulations have reverberated through the global industry. Its competition and online-content rules affect large U.S. tech companies including Meta Platforms, Apple and Google parent Alphabet. The Artificial Intelligence Act will still need final approval from parliamentarians and representatives from the EU's 27 countries, and is unlikely to take full effect before 2026.

"The EU is the first in the world to set in place robust regulation on AI," said Dragos Tudorache, a member of the European Parliament from Romania and one of the lead negotiators for the AI Act.

The deal would ban several AI applications, including untargeted scraping of images to create facial-recognition databases, and set new rules for systems that lawmakers consider high-risk, according to Parliament. It also lays out transparency requirements for general-purpose AI systems and the so-called foundation models that power them and are trained on vast data sets. These include complying with EU copyright law and creating detailed summaries about the content used for training.

Penalties could reach up to 7% of a company's global revenue, depending on company size and the rule that was broken, according to Parliament. 

A text of the agreement wasn't immediately available.

Countries worldwide have struggled with whether and how to regulate AI. The Biden administration issued an executive order in October that officials described as the strongest set of actions globally to ensure the safety of AI systems. Chinese regulators earlier this year issued rules dealing with generative AI.

Europe's AI Act was first proposed in 2021, before chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard were launched. The introduction of those chatbots and the popularization of a range of other AI applications in recent years prompted some lawmakers to seek to introduce new provisions." [1]

1. EXCHANGE --- EU Reaches Deal On Comprehensive Regulation of AI. Kim Mackrael.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 09 Dec 2023: B.9.