Hailed as a world first, European Union artificial intelligence rules are facing a make-or-break moment. Negotiators will meet to hammer out the draft’s final details this week, but the talks have been complicated by the sudden rise of generative AI. First suggested in 2019, the AI Act was expected to be the world’s first such comprehensive regulations. But the process has been bogged down by a last-minute battle over how to govern systems that underpin general purpose AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot. Big tech companies are lobbying against what they see as overregulation that stifles innovation. European lawmakers, meanwhile, want added safeguards for the cutting-edge AI systems those companies are developing.
