The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI, via OCG AI working group) appears to have recommended that standardization organizations should be tasked with the technical definition of AI, as well as the description of a categorization framework for high-risk AI in a letter to the European Commission.

Standards and standardization organizations play a key role in light of the EU’s ongoing work on regulation: the AI Act currently states that it is possible for standards, if they exist and match the legal requirements, to replace specific aspects of the conformity assessment on those requirements. Relatedly, the EuropeanAI newsletter recently covered the European Strategy on Standardisation and possible impacts of the EU-US Trade and Tech Council’s workstreams on standardization and risk management for AI. However, even when all of this will be in further motion, it would remain difficult to assess the vast majority of AI systems and algorithms already deployed. To tackle this issue, Stanford's Cyber Policy Center and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence launched an AI Audit Challenge. The goal is to focus on illegal discrimination against protected categories and develop tools to asses AI systems for this.
 

This week’s newsletter looks at ongoing EU policy discourse on data governance. In particular, we wanted to explore this topic in light of the first partial compromise text on the Data Act circulated by the Czech Presidency (Council of the EU). The text appears to have made some novel proposals surrounding the definitions and scope, data sharing and business relations. Specifically, it covers an expansion of the definition to include “any item able to collect or generate data and communicate it”, it introduces accessibility rights for data contributed (including metadata), and, similar to some lighter obligations for small and medium sized enterprises under the AI Act, the Data Act excludes micro and small companies from data sharing obligations. On the latter, the Czech text proposes that “the exemption should continue to apply to companies that have reached the medium size by less than one year”. This compromise text will kickstart discussions in the Council’s Telecom working party today.