The EU’s new AI Act can ban AI systems that pose “unacceptable risk”

by | Feb 3, 2025 | E-commerce News

In other EU news… As of Sunday, the European Union can ban the use of AI systems that they deem to pose “unacceptable risk or harm.”

February 2 is the first compliance deadline for the EU's AI Act, a comprehensive AI regulatory framework that the European Parliament approved last March after years of development that is designed to cover a variety of use cases where AI might appear and interact with individuals, from consumer applications to physical environments.

The Act defines four broad levels of risk: 

  1. Minimal risk, such as email spam filters, will face no regulatory oversight.
  2. Limited risk, such as customer service chatbots, will have a light-touch regulatory oversight.
  3. High risk, such as AI for healthcare recommendations, will face heavy regulatory oversight.
  4. Unacceptable risk applications, such as building a social scoring system, will be prohibited entirely.

Other examples of Unacceptable Risk Applications include: 

  • AI that manipulates a person’s decisions subliminally or deceptively.
  • AI that exploits vulnerabilities like age, disability, or socioeconomic status.
  • AI that attempts to predict people committing crimes based on their appearance.
  • AI that uses biometrics to infer a person’s characteristics, like their sexual orientation.
  • AI that collects real-time biometric data in public places for law enforcement.
  • AI that attempts to infer people’s emotions at work or school.
  • AI that creates facial recognition databases by scraping images online or from security cameras.

There are a few exceptions to several of the AI Act’s prohibitions, such as the Act permitting law enforcement to use certain systems that collect biometrics in public places if those systems help perform a “targeted search” for an abduction victim or to help prevent a “specific, substantial, and imminent” threat to life. (What happens to the data afterwards?) However exemptions require authorization from the appropriate governing bodies.

Companies that are found to be using any of the above AI applications in the EU will be subject to fines up to €35M or 7% of their annual revenue, regardless of where they are headquartered.

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