What is the EU AI Act and how does it affect AI development?
The EU AI Act is the world's first comprehensive AI regulation, establishing a risk-based framework for AI systems. Risk categories: (1) Unacceptable risk (banned): social scoring by governments, real-time biometric identification in public spaces (with limited exceptions), manipulation of vulnerable persons, and emotion recognition in workplaces and schools. (2) High risk (heavily regulated): AI in hiring, education, credit scoring, law enforcement, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. Requires conformity assessment, human oversight, transparency, accuracy, and robustness. (3) Limited risk (transparency obligations): chatbots must disclose they are AI, deepfakes must be labeled, and emotion recognition systems must inform users. (4) Minimal risk (no restrictions): spam filters, AI in video games, and most consumer applications. Compliance requirements for high-risk AI: implement a risk management system throughout the AI lifecycle, use high-quality training data with bias auditing, maintain technical documentation, implement logging and traceability, provide clear user instructions, ensure human oversight capability, and demonstrate accuracy, robustness, and cybersecurity. General-purpose AI models (like GPT-4, Claude): must provide technical documentation, comply with copyright law, and publish training content summaries. Models posing systemic risk face additional obligations including adversarial testing and incident reporting. Timeline: provisions phase in over 2024-2027. Penalties: up to 35 million EUR or 7% of global turnover for the most serious violations. Impact on development: implement AI risk assessments for all new AI projects, document training data provenance and bias testing, establish human oversight mechanisms, maintain detailed technical documentation, and implement monitoring and incident reporting processes.