How the AI Act Was Negotiated and What Comes Next (with Brando Benifei)

Yeah.

In fact, I've been working a lot [chuckles] on the AI Act, even in this mandate, after we finished the legislative procedure in the previous one.

So at the beginning of 2024, at the end of the past mandate, uh, uh, before the European elections of June 2024, we concluded the negotiations around the AI Act.

The AI Act was a reality.

But a lot was still to be done, and we have, uh, worked on it in these, uh, two years of the new mandate already.

What I'm referring to, first of all, we established a implementation working group of the AI Act that I chair with another colleague, Michael McNamara.

Um, we are, uh, supervising the implementation of the AI Act, which means, uh, first of all, it was the prohibitions that needed to be checked upon.

That was the first part to be fully implemented.

Then the transparency, um, and the GPAI rules that we are now in the middle of working on, and we will discuss about that.

And then we are lo- also looking forward to the, uh, high-risk use cases to be fully implemented by the end of 2027.

So we have been working on supervising implementation, involving national parliaments and national authorities, uh, strengthening the AI office, looking at its building, of the building of the AI office, and this was one first very important point.

But the other one was also getting engaged with the digital omnibuses because one of them was exactly directed at the AI Act.

And to be frank, me and other colleagues didn't take very happily this decision of a, a revision of the AI Act even before we were fully implementing it.

We thought it was a bit far-fetched, a bit rushed, and, uh, impact assessment was not there.

It looked more a political move from the commission at the beginning of this mandate to actually follow, uh, the push on competitiveness, which I think is a good point to look at, but probably, uh, that was not the right, uh, perspective to take to just, uh, reopen already the AI Act and also the push from US.

So I have to say that, uh, the...

when the work started, and now we finished already the work on the AI Digital Omnibus that, uh, revised partially the AI Act, the political situation has changed a bit.

I think the Greenland shock has, uh, weighed in, and the debate inside the institutions has changed a bit, and we realize that the competitiveness agenda is much larger than just cutting a bit of legislation.

So we have simplified some procedures of the AI Act, I think correctly for smaller businesses, and we have also foreseen a delay for the implementation of the high-risk use cases regulation linked to the delay on standards.

And so to some extent, it was also a, a needed, uh, extra time.

But then we have pushed back on most of the more, uh, far-reaching simplification, but in my view, deregulation pushes.

And instead, we have also introduced, uh, some elements that were not there, that were the result of the time that has passed and new, uh, challenges that have emerged.

Uh, I'm referring to the new prohibition that will kick in at the end of 2026 on child sexual, uh, material and on non-consensual nudification.

This was an emerging issue also linked to the scandal around this for the Grok, uh, system, but also for other systems, and we have in fact reacted.

And this is interesting.