EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act)

On 1 August 2024, the EU AI Act entered into force. The AI Act is the first-ever legal framework on AI which addresses the risks of AI and provides AI developers and deployers with clear requirements and obligations to ensure that AI developed and used in the EU is trustworthy, to safeguard people's fundamental rights.

The AI Act introduces risk-based approach to define AI systems:

• Minimal risk: These systems, such as AI-enabled recommender systems and spam filters, face no obligations under the AI Act due to their minimal risk to citizens' rights and safety.
• Specific transparency risk: AI systems like chatbots must clearly disclose to users that they are interacting with a machine. Certain AI-generated content, including deep fakes, must be labelled as such, and users need to be informed when biometric categorisation or emotion recognition systems are being used.
• High risk: such AI systems, e.g. systems used for recruitment, or to assess whether somebody is entitled to get a loan, have to comply with strict requirements, including risk-mitigation systems, high quality of data sets, logging of activity, detailed documentation, clear user information, human oversight, and a high level of robustness, accuracy, and cybersecurity.
• Unacceptable risk: AI systems considered a clear threat to the fundamental rights of people, such as applications that manipulate human behaviour to circumvent users' free will, that allow ‘social scoring' by governments or companies, certain applications of predictive policing, and some uses of biometric systems, will be banned.

The AI Act also introduces rules for so-called general-purpose AI models, which are highly capable AI models that are designed to perform a wide variety of tasks like generating human-like text.

AI Innovation Package

The AI Act is part of a wider package of policy measures to support the development of trustworthy AI, which also includes the AI Innovation Package. Initiatives under this package include the following:

• The creation of AI Factories using high-performance computing to support the development, testing, evaluation and validation of large scale, general purpose AI training models and emerging AI applications.
• A European AI Office, established within the European Commission, as the AI centre of expertise across the EU. It supports governance bodies in Member States in implementing the AI Act. It develops tools, methodologies and benchmarks for evaluating capabilities and reach of general-purpose AI models, and classifying models with systemic risks, it draws up guidelines and codes of practice and investigates possible infringement of rules.
• The GenAI4EU initiative aims to support the development of novel use cases and emerging applications in Europe's 14 industrial ecosystems, as well as the public sector. Application areas include robotics, health, biotech, manufacturing, mobility, climate and virtual worlds.

Good to know

For applicants planning to submit AI-related project proposals, it is strongly recommended to be aware of relevant legislation and initiatives on EU level and to demonstrate links between their project proposals and these initiatives.