EU AI Act agreed at political level



The Council of the European Union and the European Parliament have reached political agreement on the EU AI Act which is expected to be formally adopted in early 2024. The political agreement is now followed by technical work and translations before the final text is available and published in the Official Journal.

The provisional agreement bans, for example, cognitive behavioural manipulation, the untargeted scraping of facial images from the Internet or CCTV footage, emotion recognition in the workplace and educational institutions, social scoring, biometric categorisation to infer sensitive data, such as sexual orientation or religious beliefs, and some cases of predictive policing for individuals.

The provisional agreement provides for a fundamental rights impact assessment before a high-risk AI system is put onto the market by its deployers, the Council says.

There will be a two-year period (with regard to most provisions) for organisations to prepare for compliance after the Act has entered into force.

The EU AI Act is expected to influence law-making globally in this area.

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The UK proposes a different approach to AI regulation compared to the EU's AI Act. The government is on the cusp of publishing its response to the AI White Paper following consultations. PL&B is running a Roundtable on AI in January.