The European Union agrees on the first law in the world to regulate artificial intelligence

After several days of intense negotiations, the institutions of the European Union agreed this Friday on the artificial intelligence law that allows or prohibits the use of technology depending on the risk it poses to people and that seeks to boost the European industry against giants. like China and the United States.

“The EU artificial intelligence law is a pioneer in the world. A single legal framework for the development of artificial intelligence that can be trusted,” said the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in a message on the social network X (formerly Twitter).

The agreement was reached after 36 hours of debate, and will still have to be ratified by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, the institution that represents European governments.

The pact was reached after days of intense negotiations in which one of the sensitive points has been the use that law enforcement agencies will be able to make of biometric identification cameras to guarantee national security and prevent crimes such as terrorism or the protection of infrastructures.

The law prohibits facial recognition cameras in public spaces, but governments have pushed to allow them in specific cases, always with prior judicial authorization.

The European Parliament, on the other hand, came to the negotiations with a clear intention to ban these artificial intelligence cameras, although the rapporteur of the law, the social democrat Brando Benifei, opened the door last Wednesday to allowing some exceptions if they are accompanied by strong safeguards for human rights.

The other big issue that has focused the negotiations is the regulation of the foundational models of artificial intelligence, the systems on which programs with ChatGPT, from the company OpeanAI, or Bard, from Google, are based.

Initially, the law was not intended to regulate these types of systems, because they had not yet become popular when Brussels proposed the law in April 2021, but community institutions have seen the need to legislate them since the outbreak of ChatGPT last year.

The negotiations were “passionate”, since the objective of the law is to regulate the use of a technology with great possibilities for society, which at the same time raises doubts and some questions that the developers of artificial intelligence still do not know how to answer, according to sources familiar with the debates.

The Spanish presidency of the EU Council has achieved one of its main objectives in this semester with the agreement of this pioneering standard in the world.

The objective is to “give peace of mind”

“AI is a great evolution, but it all depends on how we are going to use it,” PSOE MEP Ibán García del Blanco, present at the negotiations, explained weeks ago to 20minutos.

He sees AI as “an opportunity” but recognizes that at the same time “it is full of risks”. García del Blanco, in the current scenario, already assumed reality to also claim the need for a standard at the community level.

“It is a technology that is not new but has reached a point of maturity that makes it seem very revolutionary.”. Technically it is more powerful than it was in the past and it is already being applied very widely,” he summarized.. The objective, he says, “is to give peace of mind to citizens.”