Everything You Need to Know About the EU's Game-Changing AI Legislation
The European Parliament voted today to move forward with the first comprehensive artificial intelligence legislation, known as the AI Act.
It's the first step in a process that will culminate later this year when a final version of the law is expected to pass, The New York Times reports(Opens in a new window). That would cement Europe as a global model for tech regulation, as it has been with data privacy, for example.
“We have made history today,” says Brando Benifei, an Italian member of the European Commission, which authored the AI Act, as reported(Opens in a new window) by The Washington Post. Benifei says European lawmakers will "set the way" for the rest of the world on "responsible AI."
The European Commission began drafting the 108-page proposal(Opens in a new window) in 2021, with increased urgency since the explosive release of ChatGPT in fall 2022, as well as competitors from Google, Microsoft, and image creators such as Dall-E and Midjourney.
The US has yet to pass similar legislation, opting for softer approaches such as the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act(Opens in a new window) (2020) and AI Bill of Rights(Opens in a new window) (October 2022).
At a Senate hearing on AI last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman urged Congress to act(Opens in a new window) and implement stricter regulations to mitigate the potential harm of these powerful, opaque systems. Microsoft President Brad Smith also called on the US and other countries to establish their own government agencies dedicated to regulating AI.
The AI Act defines artificial intelligence as software that can, "for a given set of human-defined objectives, generate outputs such as content, predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing the
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