EU gives green light to landmark AI rules
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The news: The European Council has approved a new law which aims to harmonise AI rules across the European Union.
The numbers: The rules will enter into force next month, and fines for violations range from €7.5 million ($8.2 million) or 1.5% of turnover to €35 million, or, 7% of global turnover.
The context: The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act is the first in the world to take a ‘risk based’ approach, whereby the higher the risk to cause harm to society, the stricter the rules will be. The Council said that as the first of its kind, the AI Act can set the global standard for AI regulation.
The classification of AI systems will be carried out according to risk, with limited risk systems being subject to “very light transparency obligations” while high-risk systems would be authorised but subject to more onerous obligations in order to access the EU market.
AI systems for cognitive behavioural manipulation and social scoring will be banned from the EU because their risk is deemed unacceptable. The law will also prohibit the use of AI for predictive policing based on profiling and systems that use biometric data to categorise people according to specific categories such as race, religion, or sexual orientation.
EU countries endorsed the AI Act on Tuesday, two months after lawmakers backed the legislation first proposed by the European Commission in 2021.
In a similar manner to the way in which the EU’s data privacy rule, GDPR, operates, companies beyond the EU using EU customer data will be expected to comply with the Union’s rules.
What they said: Mathieu Michel, Belgian secretary of state for digitisation, administrative simplification, privacy protection, and the building regulation commented: “With the AI act, Europe emphasises the importance of trust, transparency and accountability when dealing with new technologies while at the same time ensuring this fast-changing technology can flourish and boost European innovation.”
The sources: European Council press release, Reuters
