Follow this authorJosh Tyrangiel's opinions
FollowEarlier, not smarter is a nice way of letting Congress save face. It’s strategic, too. A consistent set of AI rules across the free world would make compliance easier and cheaper for companies and comfort freaked-out citizens. The AI Act addresses the former by sorting AI on a continuum of potential risk, with compliance structured to match each category. If your AI product helps people organize their closets or make content recommendations, it’s a feathery-light touch. If your AI system sorts résumés or determines loan eligibility, or if you’re a “foundation” model such as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, your model and its impacts will get regular assessments. It deals with people’s fears by banning indiscriminate surveillance, social scoring systems and anything else Chinese leader Xi Jinping might dream up. “Regulation isn’t just rules,” Tudorache said. “It’s an opportunity to express our values.”
Advertisement
The European Parliament has 705 members from 27 countries, and for decades its most important function was as a continental rubber room. Nations would often send their dimmest political lights and most careless nepo babies to Brussels, where they could bask in self-importance far from the real work of domestic politics. The Fredo Corleone strategy, basically. Those days are long gone. While the rest of the world’s governments get ever more ridiculous, the European Parliament is frequently a beacon of competence, and it’s mature enough to learn from its mistakes.
The General Data Protection Regulation, passed in 2016, is a digital privacy law full of good intentions: It gives citizens the right to know how their data is used as well as the right to be forgotten, forcing companies to delete information under certain circumstances. It’s also full of incomprehensible rules and vague enforcement responsibilities. It has made lawyers rich and driven companies that do business in Europe bonkers. Tudorache had the GDPR in mind when he wrote rules simple enough for a layperson to understand and insisted on a single enforcement authority. “I spent thousands of hours talking to stakeholders in all directions, and I’ve learned from everyone, from Google down to small start-ups,” Tudorache said. “Many of their process points found their way into law. Not because they lobbied, but because they were good arguments.”
When Tudorache was finished describing his very open not-lobbying with the AI industry, I was silent for a moment. “You are surprised,” he said with a little smile in his voice, as though he’d been hoping for just........