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The European Parliament has taken a significant step towards the regulation of artificial intelligence by voting to adopt its position for the upcoming AI Act with an overwhelming majority.
The act aims to regulate AI based on its potential to cause harm and follows a risk-based approach, prohibiting applications that pose an unacceptable risk while imposing strict regulations for high-risk use cases.

The timing of AI regulation has been a subject of debate, but Dragoș Tudorache, one of the European Parliament’s co-rapporteurs on the AI Act, emphasised that it is the right time to regulate AI due to its profound impact.
Dr Ventsislav Ivanov, AI Expert and Lecturer at Oxford Business College, said: “Regulating artificial intelligence is one of the most important political challenges of our time, and the EU should be congratulated for attempting to tame the risks associated with technologies that are already revolutionising our daily lives.

One of the main points of contention was the use of Remote Biometric Identification, with liberal and progressive lawmakers seeking to ban its real-time use except for ex-post investigations of serious crimes.
A tiered approach for AI models will be introduced with the act, including stricter regulations for foundation models and generative AI.

The European Parliament intends to introduce mandatory labelling for AI-generated content and mandate the disclosure of training data covered by copyright. This move comes as generative AI, exemplified by ChatGPT, gained widespread attention—prompting the European Commission to launch outreach initiatives to foster international alignment on AI rules.
MEPs made several significant changes to the AI Act, including expanding the list of prohibited practices to include subliminal techniques, biometric categorisation, predictive policing, internet-scraped facial recognition databases, and emotion recognition software.

Robin Röhm, CEO of Apheris, commented: “The passing of the plenary vote on the EU’s AI Act marks a significant milestone in AI regulation, but raises more questions than it answers. It will make it more difficult for start-ups to compete and means that investors are less likely to deploy capital into companies operating in the EU.
“It is critical that we allow for capital to flow to businesses, given the cost of building AI technology, but the risk-based approach to regulation proposed by the EU is likely to lead to a lot of extra burden for the European ecosystem and will make investing less attractive.”

Spain, which assumes the rotating presidency of the Council in July, has made finalising the AI law its top digital priority.

Hope to see such good steps to be taken by Our Indian Government very soon which will help our country to lead the whole world in future technology.