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European Union officials reached a landmark deal Friday on the world’s most sweeping bill to regulate artificial intelligence, cementing the bloc’s role as the de facto global tech regulator, as governments scramble to address the risks created by rapid advances in AI systems.
Details about the compromise were not immediately available. It came after three days of marathon talks, dragged out by disagreements between E.U. legislators and powerful member states, including France, Germany and Italy.
Congress and E.U. diverge on AI policy, as Brussels races to reach deal
The E.U. legislation establishes a hierarchy of regulations, putting the most stringent limits on systems that policymakers have deemed the riskiest. Late in the negotiations, France and other member states objected to provisions in the bill regulating the models that underpin generative AI products like the popular chatbot ChatGPT, which generates human-like speech by crunching data scraped from across the internet. Law enforcement’s use of facial recognition also emerged as a critical flash point in the talks.
Thierry Breton, a European commissioner, called the deal “historic” in a tweet shortly after the lengthy negotiations concluded.
“The #AIAct is much more than a rulebook — it’s a launchpad for EU startups and researchers to lead the global AI race,” he wrote. “The best is yet to come!”
The law furthers Europe’s leadership role on tech regulation. For years, the region has led the world in crafting novel laws to address concerns about digital privacy, the harms of social media and concentration in online markets.
The architects of the AI Act have “carefully considered” the implications for governments around the world since the early stages of drafting the legislation, said Dragoș Tudorache, a Romanian lawmaker co-leading the AI Act negotiation. He said he frequently hears from other legislators who are looking at the E.U.’s approach as they begin drafting their own AI bills.
“This legislation will represent a standard, a model, for many other jurisdictions out there,” he said, “which means that we have to have an extra duty of care when we draft it because it is going to be an influence for many others.”
From China to Brazil, here’s how AI is regulated around the world
After years of inaction in the U.S. Congress, E.U. tech laws have had wide-ranging implications for Silicon Valley companies. Europe’s digital privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, has prompted some companies, such as Microsoft, to overhaul how they handle users’ data even beyond Europe’s borders. Meta, Google and other companies have faced fines under the law, and Google had to delay the launch of its generative AI chatbot Bard in the region due to a review under the law. However, there are concerns that the law created costly compliance measures that have hampered small businesses, and that lengthy investigations and relatively small fines have blunted its efficacy among the world’s largest companies.
The region’s newer digital laws — the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act — have already impacted tech giants’ practices. The European Commission announced in October that it is investigating Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, for its handling of illegal content related to the Israel-Gaza war, and Breton has sent letters demanding other companies be vigilant about content related to the war under the Digital Services Act.
In a sign of regulators’ growing concerns about artificial intelligence, Britain’s competition regulator on Friday announced that it is scrutinizing the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, following the tech behemoth’s multiyear, multibillion dollar investment in the company. Microsoft recently gained a non-voting board seat at the company, following a company governance overhaul in the wake of CEO Sam Altman’s return.
Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a post on X that the companies would work with the regulators, but he sought to distinguish the companies’ ties from other Big Tech AI acquisitions, specifically calling out Google’s 2014 purchase of the London company DeepMind.
Meanwhile, Congress remains in the early stages of crafting legislation addressing artificial intelligence, after months of hearings and forums focused on the technology. Senators this week signaled that Washington was taking a far lighter approach focused on incentivizing developers to build AI in the United States, with lawmakers raising concerns that the E.U.’s law could be too heavy-handed.
Concern was even higher in European AI circles, where the new legislation is seen as potentially holding back technological innovation, giving further advantages to the United States and Britain, where AI research and development is already more advanced.
“There will be a couple of innovations that are just not possible or economically feasible anymore,” said Andreas Liebl, managing director of the AppliedAI Initiative, a German center for the promotion of artificial intelligence development. “It just slows you down in terms of global competition.”
This is a developing story and it will be updated.