On Friday 3 December, the Telecommunications Ministers of the EU Member States will take stock of the progress made by the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the EU on harmonised rules for artificial intelligence (AI) (see EUROPE 12812/2).
Several clarifications were made in the EU Council Presidency’s partial compromise. A clarification was made regarding the exclusion of the field of national security from the scope of application, which would remain under the responsibility of the Member States.
The definitions have been reworked in the EU Council Presidency’s compromise text to “ensure greater legal clarity and to better reflect what is meant by an AI system”.
This new definition, the paper says, makes it explicit that “any such system must be capable of determining how to achieve a given set of human-defined goals through learning, reasoning or modelling”.
The prohibited AI practices and the classification of systems as ‘high risk’ - the focus of discussions in the European Parliament (see EUROPE 12829/11) - have also been clarified.
Thus, the use of AI for social rating purposes by private or public actors is prohibited. The use of remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces may be carried out by those acting on behalf of law enforcement agencies.
With regard to the classification of high-risk AI systems, the Slovenian Presidency has expanded the list of entities concerned to include digital infrastructure and environmental protection.
In this respect, several Member States have pointed to a lack of clarity regarding the requirements for high-risk AI systems.
“In order to make it easier for companies to comply, practical guidance on how to comply should be provided”, summarises the Slovenian Presidency.
Other issues will also require further analysis in future discussions before they can be resolved.
Several Member States considered that some of the planned requirements are too strict, such as the training, validation and test data sets, which are supposed to be “error-free and complete”.
This “seems almost impossible to achieve in most scenarios”, some Member States said.
Finally, part of the forthcoming discussions on the subject are expected to be devoted to the potential burden and resources that this future regulation could imply for SMEs.
Several Member States have called for clarification of the overall compliance framework to ensure that small businesses are not treated in the same way as the larger players, who are able to absorb the costs.
See the compromise text: https://bit.ly/3o2REtK (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)