EU Parliament approves AI act

The European Parliament has approved the Artificial Intelligence Act, the world’s first binding law aimed at reducing AI risks. The Parliament said the rules will ensure AI safety and compliance with fundamental human rights, while boosting innovation across the EU. The regulation, agreed in negotiations with member states in December, was endorsed by MEPs, with 523 votes in favour, 46 against and 49 abstentions. “The regulation aims to protect fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability from high-risk AI, while boosting innovation and establishing Europe as a leader in the field. The regulation establishes obligations for AI based on its potential risks and level of impact,” said the Parliament. The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten citizens’ rights, including biometric categorisation based on sensitive characteristics. They also ban untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases. Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring, predictive policing based solely on profiling a person or assessing their characteristics, and AI that manipulates human behaviour or exploits people’s vulnerabilities will also be forbidden. The use of biometric identification systems (RBI) by law enforcement is prohibited in principle, except in “exhaustively listed and narrowly defined situations”, said the Parliament. “Real-time” RBI can only be deployed if strict safeguards are met. “Clear obligations are also foreseen for other high-risk AI systems – due to their significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law,” said the Parliament. Examples of high-risk AI uses include critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services, certain law enforcement systems, migration and border management, justice and democratic processes. “Such systems must assess and reduce risks, maintain use logs, be transparent and accurate, and ensure human oversight. Citizens will have a right to submit complaints about AI systems and receive explanations about decisions based on high-risk AI systems that affect their rights,” said the Parliament. General-purpose AI (GPAI) systems, and the GPAI models they are based on, must meet certain transparency requirements under the regulation. These requirements include compliance with EU copyright law and publishing detailed summaries of the content used for training. “The more powerful GPAI models that could pose systemic risks will face additional requirements, including performing model evaluations, assessing and mitigating systemic risks, and reporting on incidents. Additionally, artificial or manipulated images, audio or video content (‘deepfakes’) need to be clearly labelled as such,” said the Parliament. During the plenary debate on Tuesday, the Internal Market Committee co-rapporteur Brando Benifei said: “We finally have the world’s first binding law on artificial intelligence, to reduce risks, create opportunities, combat discrimination and bring transparency. Thanks to parliament, unacceptable AI practices will be banned in Europe, and the rights of workers and citizens will be protected. The AI Office will now be set up to support companies to start complying with the rules before they enter into force. We ensured that human beings and European values are at the very centre of AI’s development”. The regulation needs to be formally endorsed by the European Council.

EU Parliament approves AI act

World’s first binding law on artificial intelligence to reduce risks

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