Shaping Europe's Digital Future: The AI Act
The AI Act is the first-ever comprehensive legal framework on Artificial Intelligence (AI) worldwide. Its aim is to foster trustworthy AI in Europe and beyond, ensuring that AI systems respect fundamental rights, safety, and ethical principles, and address risks posed by very powerful and impactful AI models.
Why Do We Need Rules on AI?
While most AI systems pose limited to no risk and can contribute to solving many societal challenges, certain AI systems create risks that we must address to avoid undesirable outcomes. The AI Act ensures that Europeans can trust what AI has to offer by addressing risks specifically created by AI applications, prohibiting AI practices that pose unacceptable risks, and determining a list of high-risk applications.
The AI Act: A Risk-Based Approach
The AI Act defines 4 levels of risk for AI systems: banned, high-risk, limited-risk, and minimal or no-risk. High-risk AI systems include those used in critical infrastructures, educational or vocational training, safety components of products, employment, law enforcement, and migration, asylum, and border control management.
How Does it All Work in Practice for Providers of High-Risk AI Systems?
Once an AI system is on the market, authorities are in charge of market surveillance, deployers ensure human oversight and monitoring, and providers have a post-market monitoring system in place. Providers and deployers will also report serious incidents and malfunctioning.
Future-Proof Legislation
The AI Act has a future-proof approach, allowing rules to adapt to technological change. AI applications should remain trustworthy even after they have been placed on the market. This requires ongoing quality and risk management by providers.
Enforcement and Implementation
The European AI Office oversees the AI Act's enforcement and implementation with the member states, striving to create an environment where AI technologies respect human dignity, rights, and trust.
Next Steps
The AI Act entered into force on August 1, and will be fully applicable 2 years later, with some exceptions. To facilitate the transition to the new regulatory framework, the Commission has launched the AI Pact, a voluntary initiative that seeks to support the future implementation and invites AI developers from Europe and beyond to comply with the key obligations of the AI Act ahead of time.
