Europe one step away from adopting AI rules after lawmakers' vote

The European Parliament and EU countries had clinched a preliminary deal in December after nearly 40 hours of negotiations on issues such as governments' use of biometric surveillance and how to regulate foundation models of generative AI such as ChatGPT.

Europe moved closer to adopting the world's first artificial intelligence rules on Wednesday as EU lawmakers endorsed a provisional agreement for a technology whose use is rapidly growing across a wide swathe of industries and in everyday life. The legislation called the AI Act will regulate foundation models or generative AI such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI that are trained on large volumes of data to generate new content and even perform tasks.

It will restrict governments' use of real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces to cases of certain crimes, prevention of genuine threats, such as terrorist attacks, and searches for people suspected of the most serious crimes. The rules will cover high-impact, general-purpose AI models and high-risk AI systems which will have to comply with specific transparency obligations and EU copyright laws.

"I welcome the overwhelming support from the European Parliament for the EU AI Act, the world's first comprehensive, binding framework for trustworthy AI. Europe is now a global standard-setter in trustworthy AI," EU industry chief Thierry Breton said. The European Parliament and EU countries had clinched a preliminary deal in December after nearly 40 hours of negotiations on issues such as governments' use of biometric surveillance and how to regulate foundation models of generative AI such as ChatGPT.

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