The EU has taken the collective flag to regulate AI. At the end of March this year, the EU gave the green light for legal regulation of the exponentially developing AI. The stated aim is both to ensure the necessary security and appropriate respect for fundamental rights and to promote potential innovations. The EU's new AI law — the so-called ”AI Act“— generally urges caution with technological innovations.
What does the new EU AI Act contain?
In general, the EU's new AI law aims to create a balance between procedural performance and guaranteed protection of privacy. This makes the AI Act the world's first comprehensive (and binding) set of rules for AI. This is primarily about regulating commercial applications, in no way hindering promising research and development activities. AI made and hosted in Europe should ultimately become a seal of approval that promises to protect data protection and the rights of individual citizens in the long term. Accordingly, AI applications are divided into four different risk levels: unacceptable, high, limited and minimal risk. From 2026, the EU's new AI Act will prohibit AI applications that threaten to torpedo citizens' rights in the long term. These include biometric categorization based on sensitive features and the untargeted reading of facial images from the Internet or from surveillance cameras for facial recognition databases. Emotion recognition systems at work and in schools and the evaluation of social behavior with AI will also be prohibited in the future. Preemptive police work, so-called “profiling,” which is based on the use of AI mechanisms, and the use of artificial intelligence to influence people's behavior or exploit their weaknesses, are also prohibited under the new AI Act.
The AI Act as a locational advantage for Europe
Such an approach, which culminates in the AI Act, is expected to provide a huge locational advantage over, for example, the USA in the West or China in the East: Although it is likely to be considered utopian to allow research to take place on the same scale and scope as in Silicon Valley, the AI Act advertises with the promise of ensuring reliable and, as it were, extremely data protection-compliant processes. According to the EU's wishes, users are in the foreground and should never be objectified, but should always retain the upper hand or the power of interpretation in their form as subjects endowed with agency power. The emphasis on the security component as an important aspect of the EU's new AI Act (AI Act) could tip the proverbial balance when companies decide they no longer want to forego the blessings of AI, but want to achieve the highest level of data security.
Preliminary conclusion on the new EU AI Act (AI Act)
If you consider it important to establish a minimum level of security in highly speculative areas, it can be considered particularly important to have a framework set of rules. That is exactly what the EU's new AI Act promises and will thus influence the direction of pan-European efforts in the area of AI. How rigid the EU's legal control will ultimately be as part of the AI Act remains to be seen in the (near) future. At this point, it should be noted in conclusion that every effort to create a safe environment should be welcomed for now, because anyone who is concerned with shaping the future should not lose sight of not only the necessary acceleration but also the ability to slow down. Caution is the mother of the porcelain box; and so the new AI Act of the EU is a sign that you are not blocking yourself out of new technological realities, but trying to act in accordance with them.
