The Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is a proposed

regulation Regulation is the management of complex systems according to a set of rules and trends. In systems theory, these types of rules exist in various fields of biology and society, but the term has slightly different meanings according to context. For ...

by the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...

which aims to introduce a common regulatory and legal framework for

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

. Its scope encompasses all sectors (except for military), and to all types of artificial intelligence. As a piece of product regulation, the proposal does not confer rights on individuals, but regulates the providers of artificial intelligence systems, and entities making use of them in a professional capacity. The proposed regulation classifies artificial intelligence applications by risk, and regulates them accordingly. Low-risk applications are not regulated at all, with Member States largely precluded via

maximum harmonisation Maximum harmonisation is a term used in EU law. If a piece of law (usually a directive but occasionally also a regulation) is described as maximum harmonisation, national law may not exceed the terms of the legislation. In practice, that prohibi ...

from regulating them further and existing national laws relating to the regulation of design or use of such systems disapplied. A voluntary code of conduct scheme for such low risk systems is envisaged, although not present from the outset. Medium and high-risk systems would require compulsory

conformity assessment Conformance testing — an element of conformity assessment, and also known as compliance testing, or type testing — is testing or other activities that determine whether a process, product, or service complies with the requirements of a specific ...

, undertaken as self-assessment by the provider, before being put on the market. Some especially critical applications which already require conformity assessment to be supervised under existing EU law, for example for medical devices, would the provider's self-assessment under AI Act requirements to be considered by the

notified body A notified body, in the European Union, is an organisation that has been designated by a member state to assess the conformity of certain products, before being placed on the EU market, with the applicable essential technical requirements. These e ...

conducting the assessment under that regulation, such as the Medical Devices Regulation. The proposal also would place prohibitions on certain types of applications, namely remote biometric recognition, applications that subliminally manipulate persons, applications that exploit vulnerabilities of certain groups in a harmful way, and social credit scoring. For the first three, an authorisation regime context of law enforcement is proposed, but social scoring would be banned completely. The act also proposes the introduction of a European Artificial Intelligence Board which will encourage national cooperation and ensure that the regulation is respected. Like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the AI Act could become a global standard. It is already having impact beyond Europe; in September 2021, Brazil’s Congress passed a bill that creates a legal framework for artificial intelligence.

References

External links

Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council Laying Down Harmonised Rules on Artificial Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act)
on

EUR-Lex Eur-Lex (stylized EUR-Lex) is an official website of European Union law and other public documents of the European Union (EU), published in 24 official languages of the EU. The Official Journal (OJ) of the European Union is also published on EUR- ...

Procedure 2021/0106/COD
on EUR-Lex
Procedure 2021/0106(COD)
on ŒIL Policies of the European Union European Digital Strategy 2021 in law 2021 in the European Union {{politics-stub