EU ministers have given their final approval to the Artificial Intelligence Act, a major new law that regulates the use of the transformative technology in "high-risk" situations, such as law enforcement and employment.
The European Union hopes that by laying down strict AI rules relatively early in the technology's development it will address the risks in time and help shape the international agenda for regulating AI.
Systems intended for use in "high-risk" situations, which are listed in the law's annexes, will have to meet various standards spanning transparency, accuracy, cybersecurity and quality of training data, among other things. Some uses - such as Chinese-style social credit scoring - will be banned outright.
There are also more basic rules for "general purpose" systems that may be used in various situations - some high-risk, others not. AI-generated content such as images, sound or text would have to be marked as such to protect against misleading deepfakes.
