X, Meta and Apple refuse to sign European Commission’s AI Pact complementing the EU AI Act

IRIS 2024-9:1/8

Maria Bustamante

European Audiovisual Observatory

In August 2024, the European Commission launched the AI Pact, a new initiative aimed at further developing AI regulation. Designed to promote ethical and responsible AI development, the Pact is an additional tool to help companies adapt to the new European AI regulations that came into force in August. It calls on AI developers to voluntarily adopt the key obligations set out in the regulations ahead of the legal deadline. For more information about the process for adopting the AI Act, see IRIS 2024-6:1/3. The Pact will be progressively applied alongside the regulations themselves.

However, tech giants including X, Meta and Apple, who are sceptical about the EU’s new AI laws, have decided not to sign this voluntary instrument.

The Pact has nevertheless been signed by around 100 companies, including other major players in the sector such as Google, Open AI, Microsoft and Amazon. “The AI Pact is a voluntary instrument. Of course, we urge all companies to sign up. More of them will do so as time goes on, but these are private companies and they are entitled to make their own decisions,” said Thomas Régnier, European Commission spokesperson.

The EU AI Act regulates the use of AI technology according to the risks it poses to individuals. Signatories of the Pact will therefore be required to prohibit:

- biometric AI systems that categorise people based on their political, religious or philosophical beliefs, race or sexual orientation;

- systems that create or expand facial recognition databases through the untargeted scraping of facial images from the Internet or video footage.

They will also need to respect:

- the transparency criteria of generative AI systems, which must clearly and distinguishably indicate whether content is generated by AI or not;

- the data set used to train these systems and its compliance with copyright law.

At the same time, the European Commission encouraged companies to develop their AI systems.