Lawmakers who helped shape the European Union’s landmark AI Act are worried that the 27-member bloc is considering watering down aspects of the AI rules in the face of lobbying from U.S. technology companies and pressure from the Trump administration.
The EU’s AI Act was approved just over a year ago, but its rules for general-purpose AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o will only come into effect in August. Ahead of that, the European Commission—which is the EU’s executive arm—has tasked its new AI Office with preparing a code of practice for the big AI companies, spelling out how exactly they will need to comply with the legislation.
But now a group of European lawmakers, who helped to refine the law’s language as it passed through the legislative process, is voicing concern that the AI Office will blunt the impact of the EU AI Act in “dangerous, undemocratic” ways. The leading American AI vendors have amped up their lobbying against parts of the EU AI Act recently, and the lawmakers are also concerned that the Commission may be looking to curry favor with the Trump administration, which has already made it clear it sees the AI Act as anti-innovation and anti-American.
The EU lawmakers say the third draft of the code, which the AI Office published earlier this month, takes obligations that are mandatory under the AI Act and inaccurately presents them as “entirely voluntary.” These obligations include testing models to see how they might allow things like wide-scale discrimination and the spread of disinformation.
