tory of the week: After a 36-hour negotiating marathon, EU policymakers reached a political agreement on what is set to become the global benchmark for regulating Artificial Intelligence on Saturday. As Euractiv reported, the first part of the trilogue closed the parts on open source, foundation models and governance. However, the exhausted EU officials called for a recess 22 hours after it was clear that a proposal from the Spanish presidency on the sensitive law enforcement chapter would not have a majority in the Parliament. The discussions picked up again on Friday morning and only ended late at night. The provisional agreement sees the Council obtaining its broad national security exemption, while MEPs received several concessions on the bans.
The technical work continued this week with three intense meetings.
The two co-legislators have different understandings on what had been
agreed on ex-post biometric identification, which Euractiv understands
will only require judicial authorisation for serious crimes, whilst only
notification to the data protection authorities will suffice for the
rest. Meanwhile, Macron made some negative statements
on the agreement, saying “I ask that we evaluate this regulation on a
regular basis. And if we lose leaders or pioneers because of that, we
will have to come back to it.” In other words, he did not say France
would try to block the law, which it might not have the numbers to do at
any rate. Euractiv understands the most sceptical countries are in
touch with the Council presidency to request ‘clarifications’ in the
text. Expect some theatre still to come at the COREPER debrief on
Friday. (...)
