The act aims to regulate AI based on its potential to cause harm and follows a risk-based approach, prohibiting applications that pose an unacceptable risk while imposing strict regulations for high-risk use cases.

The timing of AI regulation has been a subject of debate, but Dragoș Tudorache, one of the European Parliament’s co-rapporteurs on the AI Act, emphasised that it is the right time to regulate AI due to its profound impact.

Dr Ventsislav Ivanov, AI Expert and Lecturer at Oxford Business College, said: “Regulating artificial intelligence is one of the most important political challenges of our time, and the EU should be congratulated for attempting to tame the risks associated with technologies that are already revolutionising our daily lives.

“As the chaos and controversy accompanying this vote show, this will be not an easy feat. Taking on the global tech companies and other interested parties will be akin to Hercules battling the seven-headed hydra.”

The adoption of the AI Act faced uncertainty as a political deal crumbled, leading to amendments from various political groups.

One of the main points of contention was the use of Remote Biometric Identification, with liberal and progressive lawmakers seeking to ban its real-time use except for ex-post investigations of serious crimes. The centre-right European People’s Party attempted to introduce exceptions for exceptional circumstances like terrorist attacks or missing persons, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

A tiered approach for AI models will be introduced with the act, including stricter regulations for foundation models and generative AI.

The European Parliament intends to introduce mandatory labelling for AI-generated content and mandate the disclosure of training data covered by copyright. This move comes as generative AI, exemplified by ChatGPT, gained widespread attention—prompting the European Commission to launch outreach initiatives to foster international alignment on AI rules.

MEPs made several significant changes to the AI Act, including expanding the list of prohibited practices to include subliminal techniques, biometric categorisation, predictive policing, internet-scraped facial recognition databases, and emotion recognition software.

An extra layer was introduced for high-risk AI applications and extended the list of high-risk areas and use cases in law enforcement, migration control, and recommender systems of prominent social media platforms.

Robin Röhm, CEO of Apheris, commented: “The passing of the plenary vote on the EU’s AI Act marks a significant milestone in AI regulation, but raises more questions than it answers. It will make it more difficult for start-ups to compete and means that investors are less likely to deploy capital into companies operating in the EU.

“It is critical that we allow for capital to flow to businesses, given the cost of building AI technology, but the risk-based approach to regulation proposed by the EU is likely to lead to a lot of extra burden for the European ecosystem and will make investing less attractive.”

With the European Parliament’s adoption of its position on the AI Act, interinstitutional negotiations will commence with the EU Council of Ministers and the European Commission. The negotiations – known as trilogues – will address key points of contention such as high-risk categories, fundamental rights, and foundation models.

Spain, which assumes the rotating presidency of the Council in July, has made finalising the AI law its top digital priority. The aim is to reach a deal by November, with multiple trilogues planned as a backup.

The negotiations are expected to intensify in the coming months as the EU seeks to establish comprehensive regulations for AI, balancing innovation and governance while ensuring the protection of fundamental rights.

“The key to good regulation is ensuring that safety concerns are addressed while not stifling innovation. It remains to be seen whether the EU can achieve this,” concludes Röhm.

(Image Credit: European Union 2023 / Mathieu Cugnot)

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With a 71 vote majority, MEPs sided with Petar Vitanov’s report that argued AI must not be allowed to encroach on fundamental rights.

An S&D party member, Vitanov pointed out that AI has not yet proven to be a wholly reliable tool on its own.

He cited examples of individuals being denied social benefits because of faulty AI tools, or people being arrested due to innacurate facial recognition, adding that “the victims are always the poor, immigrants, people of colour or Eastern Europeans. I always thought that only happens in the movies”.

Despite the report’s overall majority backing, members of the European People’s Party – the largest party in the EU – all voted against the report apart from seven exceptions.

Behind this dispute is a fundamental disagreement over what exactly constitutes encroaching on civil liberties when using AI surveillance tools.

On the left are politicians like Renew Europe MEP Karen Melchior, who believes that “predictive profiling, AI risk assessment, and automated decision making systems are weapons of ‘math destruction’… as dangerous to our democracy as nuclear bombs are for living creatures and life”.

“They will destroy the fundamental rights of each citizen to be equal before the law and in the eye of our authorities,” she said.

Meanwhile, centrist and conservative-leaning MEPs tend to have a more cautious approach to banning AI technologies outright.

Pointing to the July capture of Dutch journalist Peter R. de Vries’ suspected killers thanks to AI, home affairs commissioner Ylva Johanssen described this major case as an example of “smart digital technology used in defence of citizens and our fundamental rights”.

“Don’t put protection of fundamental rights in contradiction to the protection of human lives and of societies. It’s simply not true that we have to choose. We are capable of doing both,” she added.

The Commission published its proposal for a European Artificial Intelligence Act in April.

Global human rights charity, Fair Trials, welcomed the vote — calling it a “landmark result for fundamental rights and non-discrimination in the technological age”.

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