European AI legislation may not apply to open source models
The European AI Act may get an exception for open source models. This is evident from compromise proposals seen by Reuters and TechCrunch. If such models have a ‘high risk’, they do fall under the rules of the AI Act, according to the documents.
Software companies such as GitHub and Creative Commons previously argued for an exception for open source software. According to Reuters and TechCrunch Such parties are now partly getting their way. There are some exceptions to that exception. For example, if an open source model is ‘marketed or otherwise made available as a service’, it is covered by the AI Act. It is not clear how exactly this is interpreted and whether, for example, this means that only open source software that is not commercially available can be excluded.
Even if the software has a high ‘systemic risk’, the AI Act exception does not apply. According to TechCrunch, this means that the model can have ‘a high impact’. This applies, among other things, if the cumulative amount of computing power used for training is more than 1025 flops, or floating point operations per second. There are currently few models that meet this requirement.
When the AI Act comes into effect, AI systems operating in Europe will have to comply with several rules. For example, generative AI models must meet certain transparency requirements, such as disclosing that the content has been generated by AI. They must also make clear what copyrighted material is used in their training and provide safeguards against the generation of illegal content. AI systems used for ‘social scoring’, such as security cameras with automatic facial recognition, will be completely banned under this law.
In recent months, a lot of parties have tried to persuade European lawmakers to be exempt from the AI Act. The French AI start-up Mistral and the German Aleph Alpha in particular have lobbied heavily to have foundation models exempted from the AI Act. Their counter-proposal was to regulate themselves. The EU does not appear to have agreed to this, but they may be exempt if they are free and open source.
The European Parliament and the Council of the European Union were supposed to negotiate the details of the AI Act for the last time on Wednesday. Reuters writes However, the parties still did not agree on certain crucial points, which led them to extend the negotiations to Thursday. European Commissioner Thierry Breton let us know at that the talks have ended on Thursday, but that they will meet again on Friday. Reuters does claim that the parties agreed on Thursday about the regulation of the foundation models, although the news agency does not write what the final consensus was.