Ex machina: preliminary critical assessment of the European Draft Act on artificial intelligence

This article will unpack the European Draft Act on Artificial Intelligence (AI), the first (both in Europe and in the world) far-reaching regulation in this domain. It categorizes AI systems in three (eventually four) levels of risk and it assigns to each level a particular legal framework, with its own limitations and obligations. The Draft Act was created for laudable purposes, namely to harmonize digital development with fundamental rights and European values. However, similar to many other ambitious projects, it falls short in many ways. As this article will show, several issues are incompletely regulated, and there are doubts about the exact scope and content of the legal solutions outlined in the draft. It also potentially overlaps with several other European norms, introducing the possibility of conflicts. Finally, the law’s focus on fundamental rights may come at the price of digital innovation, although critics claim that the Draft Act does not go far enough to protect such rights.