The Commission's Proposed Artificial Intelligence Regulation

A little over a year since the Commission sketched out its potential policy options for AI legislation in a White Paper on AI, and the fruition of an extensive panoply of workshops, forums, expert groups, reports, resolutions and recommendations as well as hundreds of consultation responses to the White Paper itself, the Regulation¹ is the Commission's trail blazing first attempt at formulating law to apply specifically to Artificial Intelligence.

The focus of the Regulation is on AI that the Commission terms "high risk". Much of the Regulation is drawn from approaches to regulating potentially harmful products found in existing EU safety legislation, but reworked to address potential risks in the development and operation of products and services that utilise software powered by machine learning and other AI techniques.