EU’s AI Act negotiations hit the brakes over foundation models

Luca Bertuzzi writes for Euractive about a technical meeting on the EU’s AI regulation broke down on Friday (10 November) after large EU countries asked to retract the proposed approach for foundation models. Unless the deadlock is broken in the coming days, the whole legislation is at risk.

The AI Act is a landmark bill to regulate Artificial Intelligence following a risk-based approach. The file is currently in the last phase of the legislative process, with the main EU institutions gathered in so-called trilogues to hash out the final dispositions of the law.

Foundation models have become the sticking point in this late phase of the negotiations. With the rise of ChatGPT, a popular chatbot based on OpenAI’s powerful GPT-4 model, EU policymakers have been wondering how best to cover this type of AI in the upcoming law.

At the last political trilogue on 24 October, there seemed to be a consensus to introduce rules for foundation models following a tiered approach, namely, introducing tighter rules for the most powerful ones bound to have more impact on society.

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