Artificial Intelligence, Facial Recognition Face Curbs in New EU Proposal

The European Union’s executive arm proposed a bill that would limit police use of facial-recognition software in public and ban the marketing or use of certain kinds of AI systems, in one of the broadest efforts yet to regulate high-stakes applications of artificial intelligence.

The bill proposed on Wednesday would also create a list of so-called high-risk uses of AI that would be subject to new supervision and standards for their development and use, such as critical infrastructure, college admissions and loan applications, and social-credit scores such as those used by the Chinese government. Regulators could fine a company up to 6% of its annual world-wide revenue for the most severe violations, though in practice EU officials rarely if ever mete out their maximum fines.

The bill is one of the broadest of its kind to be proposed by a Western government, and part of the EU’s expansion of its role as a global tech enforcer.

In recent years, the EU has sought to take a global lead in drafting and enforcing new regulations aimed at taming the alleged excesses of big tech companies and curbing potential dangers of new technologies, in areas ranging from digital competition to online-content moderation. The bloc’s new privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, helped set a template for broadly applied rules backed by stiff fines that has been followed in some ways by other countries—and some U.S. states.

Wednesday’s proposal faces a long road—and potential changes—before it becomes law. In the EU, such laws must be approved by both the European Council, representing the bloc’s 27 national governments, and the directly elected European Parliament, which can take years.

Some digital-rights activists, while applauding parts of the proposed legislation, said other elements appear too vague and offer too many loopholes. Some others aligned with industry, argued that the EU’s proposed rules would give an advantage to companies in China, which wouldn’t face them.

“It’s going to make it prohibitively expensive or even technologically infeasible to build AI in Europe,” said Benjamin Mueller, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Data Innovation, part of a tech-aligned think tank. “The U.S. and China are going to look on with amusement as the EU kneecaps its own startups.”

Some tech-industry lobbyists, however, said they were relieved the draft wasn’t more draconian, and applauded the approach of imposing strict oversight on only some types of so-called high-risk uses of AI, such as software for critical infrastructure and algorithms that police use to predict crimes.

“It’s positive that the commission has taken this risk-based approach,” said Christian Borggreen, vice president and head of the Brussels office at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which represents a number of large technology companies including Amazon, Facebook and Google.

There are a handful of specific practices that face outright bans in the bill.