Provisional EU agreement on the world’s first AI rules

After three days of marathon negotiations, the Council Presidency and European Parliament negotiators reached a provisional agreement on the proposed regulation on artificial intelligence (AI) on 9 December. This regulation, a first in the world, aims to ‘ensure that AI systems placed on the European market and used in the EU are safe and respect the fundamental rights and values of the EU”.

The main idea is to regulate AI according to its potential to harm society, using a “risk-based” approach: the higher the risk, the stricter the rules. Compared to the Commission’s original proposal of April 2021, the new elements of the interim agreement are mainly

Rules for high-impact general-purpose AI models likely to create systemic risk in the future, as well as high-risk AI systems;

• A revised governance system with certain implementing powers at EU level;
  an extension of the list of prohibitions, but with the possibility for law enforcement to use remote biometric identification in public spaces, subject to safeguards;
• Better protection of rights by requiring deployers of high-risk AI systems to carry out a fundamental rights impact assessment before putting an AI system into service.

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