“The AI industry is very nascent and we would probably be able to make better choices if we waited five years,” he said.
Another battleground is a voluntary set of rules for general-purpose AI model providers, which are the most complex AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini, where AI companies have sounded the alarm bell on the rules turning into another burden.
But civil society groups are pushing back against deregulation, and that’s likely to make discussions on any changes to AI laws as fraught as the first time around.
The language in Wednesday’s strategy was debated right up to publication: The part on simplification in the final version was heavily softened compared to a leaked draft reported by POLITICO ahead of the announcement. A line that said there was an “opportunity to minimize the potential compliance burden” was replaced by a statement that there’s a “need to facilitate compliance with the AI Act.”
Two leading EU lawmakers also pushed back on Wednesday against the Commission’s earlier move to ax a proposal for a single EU liability scheme for harm caused by AI. They slammed the Commission’s reasoning as “premature and unconvincing.”
Maximilian Gahntz, AI policy lead at Mozilla, warned that a push for simple AI rules “should not lead to undermining the effectiveness of the EU’s AI Act rules and what they were meant to accomplish.”
“Simplification should not mean deregulation,” he said.
