On 8 December 2023 the Council of the EU (the Council) announced that the Council and the European Parliament had reached a provisional agreement on the AI Act (the Act).
The next steps are to finalise the text. It is hoped it will be adopted early next year (although the Act will not take effect for a further 2 years).
An overview of the Act can be found here. The final text has not yet been released, but the new elements (compared with the initial European Commission proposal) are stated to be as follows:
- rules on high-impact general-purpose AI models that can cause systemic risk in the future, as well as on high-risk AI systems
- a revised system of governance with some enforcement powers at EU level
- extension of the list of prohibitions but with the possibility to use remote biometric identification by law enforcement authorities in public spaces, subject to safeguards
- better protection of rights through the obligation for deployers of high-risk AI systems to conduct a fundamental rights impact assessment prior to putting an AI system into use
