European Parliament and the Council of Europe reached a provisional agreement on the Artificial Intelligence Act (Act) that will be the first regulation on artificial intelligence on 09/12/2023.
Act aims to ensure that fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability are protected from high risk AI.
On the Act, Artificial Intelligence System (AI system) is defined as software that is developed with one or more of the techniques and approaches listed in Act and can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, generate outputs such as content, predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing the environments they interact with.
The Act establish obligations for providers and users depending on the level of risk from artificial intelligence. To that end, Act distinguishes between AI systems posing unacceptable risk, high risk, limited risk, and low or minimal risk. In this regard;
- Act explicitly bans harmful AI practices that are considered to be a clear threat to people’s safety, livelihoods and rights, because of the unacceptable risk they create.
- Act defines AI systems that have a negative impact on people’s safety or fundamental rights as high risk.
- AI systems presenting limited risk, such as systems that interacts with humans (i.e. chatbots), emotion recognition systems, biometric categorisation systems, and AI systems that generate or manipulate image, audio or video content (i.e. deepfakes), would be subject to a limited set of transparency obligations.
- All other AI systems presenting only low or minimal risk could be developed and used in the EU without conforming to any additional legal obligations.
The ACT requires Member States to designate one or more competent authorities, including a national supervisory authority, which would be tasked with supervising the application and implementation of the regulation, and establishes a European Artificial Intelligence Board (composed of representatives from the Member States and the Commission) at EU level.
With the Act, administrative fines of varying scales (up to €30 million or 6 % of the total worldwide annual turnover), depending on the severity of the infringement, are set as sanctions for non-compliance.
The agreed text will now have to be formally adopted by both Parliament and Council to become EU law. Parliament’s Internal Market and Civil Liberties committees will vote on the agreement in a forthcoming meeting.
