EU Parliament approves wide-ranging Artificial Intelligence act

The EU Parliament has approved an Artificial Intelligence Act that ensures safety and compliance with fundamental rights, while boosting innovation. 

The regulation, agreed in negotiations with member states in December 2023, 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. 

The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten citizens’ rights, including biometric categorisation systems based on sensitive characteristics and 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 (when it is 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. 

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). Examples of high-risk AI uses include critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment and essential private and public services (e.g. healthcare, banking).

The legislation requires such systems to 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. 

General-purpose AI (GPAI) systems, and the GPAI models they are based on, must meet certain transparency requirements, including 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. 

Measures to support innovation and SMEs 

In a press release, the EU said regulatory sandboxes and real-world testing will have to be established at the national level, and made accessible to SMEs and start-ups, to develop and train innovative AI before its placement on the market. 

The Internal Market Committee co-rapporteur Brando Benifei (S&D, Italy) said: “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 is still subject to a final lawyer-linguist check and is expected to be finally adopted before the end of the legislature (through the so-called corrigendum procedure). The law also needs to be formally endorsed by the Council. 

It will enter into force 20 days after its publication in the official Journal, and be fully applicable 24 months after its entry into force, except for: bans on prohibited practises, which will apply six months after the entry into force date; codes of practise (nine months after entry into force); general-purpose AI rules including governance (12 months after entry into force); and obligations for high-risk systems (36 months). 

The regulation of AI in healthcare has been a hot topic in recent years. In 2023, experts spoke to Digital Health News on the matter.