The European Union has formally approved the Artificial Intelligence Act, a comprehensive set of rules to regulate tech companies. The new law, which took two years to draft, bans certain uses of AI and imposes strict requirements on developers.
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The EU has taken a decisive step in regulating artificial intelligence by adopting a comprehensive AI Act after two years of discussions. The legislation, which officially comes into force on 1 August 2024, sets a strict framework for the development and use of artificial intelligence technologies in the EU. The deadline for implementing the law is 2 February 2025, after which tech companies must stop using applications that threaten citizens’ rights, reports The Verge. Full text The law was published on the official EU website.
The new law prohibits certain uses of AI. In particular, it prohibits the use of applications that threaten citizens’ rights, such as biometric categorization to determine sexual orientation or religion. It also prohibits the unauthorized extraction of facial images from the internet or surveillance footage.
Developers of AI systems will also have to be transparent about how their technology works, including providing summaries of the data used to train the systems. Nine months after the law comes into force, companies will have codes of practice, consisting of a set of rules outlining compliance requirements, benchmarks, key performance indicators, etc. The concept of “general AI systems” such as chatbots is also being introduced, which will have to respect copyright and be transparent about their algorithms.
The compliance deadlines for the law state that most of the rules must be implemented by August 2026, but some high-risk AI systems integrated into critical infrastructure or impacting employment, healthcare, and justice have a longer compliance deadline of August 2027.
Failure to comply with the AI Act will result in significant fines. Violating prohibitions on certain uses of AI will result in a fine of €35 million (around $38 million) or 7% of the violating company’s annual global revenue, whichever is greater. Other violations will result in smaller but still significant fines.
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