The EU AI Act – First Comprehensive Legal Framework For AI

The European Union's (EU) proposal for a regulation on harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (AI)¹ was published back in April 2021 by the European Commission, initiating the ordinary legislative procedure as per Article 294 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

The EU AI Act was not the first initiative to regulate AI. In addition to regulatory attempts and numerous documents outlining principles for AI, in 2019, the Council of Europe established the Ad-Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CAHAI), which completed its mandate in 2021 and was succeeded by the Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) to explore the feasibility of an international instrument. However, the EU AI Act emerged as the pioneering legal instrument in AI regulation over time due to various reasons, including the so-called Brussels Effect as well as the EU's intention to make the EU AI Act in AI regulation what the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)