BRUSSELS — The European Commission is open to amending the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act following an upcoming review, a top Commission official told POLITICO’s AI and Tech Summit Tuesday.
Kilian Gross, head of the Commission’s AI policy unit, ruled out fundamental reform of the rules and said that simplifying the implementation is the Commission’s first focus. But “if this should not be enough, we will as well reflect whether we need targeted changes.”
It comes as the EU reviews a swathe of laws in a deregulation push that is intended to boost the bloc’s economy and its global competitiveness.
When asked whether the Commission was open to changing the AI Act, Gross said: “Our first focus, of course, will be to simplify the implementation to see what we need to do in order to make it easier for companies” and “nevertheless effective.”
“For the time being, I can say we don’t really envisage to reopen for instance fundamentally the AI Act,” he said, but that “if anything happened, it would certainly be targeted.”
He also confirmed a new code of practice for industry — a voluntary set of rules designed to provide guardrails for the riskiest AI models — would land in weeks, after the Commission missed a May 2 deadline for the rules.
The highly anticipated code on general-purpose artificial intelligence will outline how providers like ChatGPT can comply with the AI Act’s obligations, which are set to come into effect on August 2 for these models.
The AI Office will release the code well before the August deadline, Gross said, despite missing the May milestone amid heavy lobbying from the U.S. government.
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