EU rules ask tech giants to publicly track how, when AI models go off the rails
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
AI companies are moving to user interface innovations to try to grab more unwilling training individuals. These new UI innovations will feel like shit if they try to force adoption, full of warnings and disclaimers.
Reminiscent of the cookie law, which many people hate, but they hate because companies insist in having cookies (if you don't track, you don't need the cookie popup).
Privacy, safety and reliability debates are back into dark patterns awareness. This is a territory tech companies were trying very desperately to get out of.
I think it's also brilliant in the way it answers the black box paradigm. "Oh, we cannot explain it, it's a black box". "Then explain how you made it, otherwise it's a no go".
Ultimately, this sets the discourse straight regarding what AI skepticism is all about. This is not about being anti-commerce, it's about being good commercial entities.
Granted, they'll probably end up performing worse than US or Chinese ones operating without restrictions and being uncompetitive on the global free market, but when did EU leaders ever think about long term consequences? Certainly not when they tied their economy to Russian gas and banned nuclear, certainly not when they prioritized toxic diesel engines over gasoline, certainly not when they demilitarized or when they ceded tech innovation to US and China, but for once this will be the right call, I can feel it, this will bring EU to the forefront of tech supremacy.
I have yet to see a company that prioritized quality over profits, unless forced to by regulation.
Extrapolating from historical outcomes using logic and critical thinking.
No company/start-up in history ever, became successful by having to start with more regulations than their competition.
That's just one random example that came to mind.
Nor is the destruction of the planet as plenty of other countries than China will do it for western money/business opportunities. The planet is doomed either way due to factors out of your individual control, you can choose to profit out of it or die poor thinking you did the right scarified to save it when it actually did nothing and your sacrifice was in vain. The planet is not saved just because you gave up using plastic straws and switched to tethered bottle caps while China is building 9000 new coal plants, India dumps plastic waste in the ocean and BP/Chevron have the 200th oil spill.
Globalization may be over from a military strategical point of view, but not from a capitalistic, economical and environmental point of view. But you go and pay more "green" taxes to the state for everything you buy, I'm sure that will save the planet.
Trade has always existed between settlements through mankind's history, and war as well, when trade alone doesn't make it.
Then there are the trade partners one trusts, and the ones we thought we could trust, and like the wind changes direction, no longer.
Agree with the stupidity of plastic straws, if one people actually left the beach clean as they do at home, or maybe that is exactly what they do at home, leaving garbage all over the place.
You'll still be dependent on trading with comunist China and barbaric oil rich countries like Saudi Arabia who beheaded your Journalists, because they have stuff you need and can't get anywhere else, no matter how much you dislike them.
There's idealistic fantasy politic for the political speeches to the unwashed masses, and then there's Realpolitik on which the world actually runs where our leaders do backroom deals with the devil in order for the line to go up.
Those banana and ananas fields in mainland US will be a great landscape.
Yes, regulatory compliance is a significant concern for software product design in the EU these days. But that's a good thing - it stops a lot of hare-brained ideas and abusive business models at the drafting phase. Also, from my own observation, the rules seem annoying at first, because they tend to shut down the most exciting ideas - but after a while you notice that this is because those ideas come with bad failure modes and bad second-order effects, and regulations are forcing you to actually consider them.
But EU citizens want good AI models, not EU approved models, and people can use VPN. Because regulatory process kills fast moving business and whatever is rubber stamped by EU bureaucracts and compliance-industrial complex law firms sucking out money by selling snake oil compliance services is already few years behind.
Would you buy a three years old car as a new?
Regardless of how I feel about the price of the old car, I wouldn't buy the new car if it's not legal to drive on public roads.
The car market is a great example. The US market has decided it doesn’t want EVs from the biggest EV producer in the world (China), so people are indeed buying cars with older technology than what the new global standard has become thanks to China’s successfully state-sponsored EV market.
It may very well be that the US leads globally in AI, while some markets handicap access and development for internal reasons.
What "unreliability" are you talking about in terms of American tech businesses?
> For some situations it's safer to do it in the EU despite the regulations
The EU has zero tech companies that rival FAANG et al here in the US. Zero. Because of it's (well-intentioned but harmful) business regulations.
I have a feeling you're projecting your dissatisfaction with election results more than anything tangible...
Not really, it's because the EU has 28 sets of business regulations, those of the 27 members states and of the EU itself. The single market is not yet all that single, especially when it comes to digital services. The now abandoned project of the ever closer union wasn't some idealistic bs, it was the plan to gradually fix this.
https://nltimes.nl/2025/05/20/microsofts-icc-email-block-tri...
This sort of stuff.
Not just AI models. The EU only leads in regulations and nothing else and it shows: since 2008 both China and the US have experienced insane GDP growth while the EU has been totally stagnant (inflation adjusted).
I don't think people realize at which speed the EU is falling into oblivion. It's really horrible to witness from inside the EU. Cities are poorer and poorer, high-trust societies are becoming low-trust ones due to rising (imported) poverty and crimes. Cities that used to be beautiful cities now see weekly kidnapping (Paris) and AK47s are fired in Brussels on a weekly basis.
But we should all applaud because AI is going to be regulated and because we're going to be green. Go EU, yay!
Meanwhile people in the EU don't even want to have kids anymore: I honestly have got a hard time figuring out why young people in the EU would even want kids seen the overall atmosphere reigning here now.
So while India, Brazil, China, the US, and many other countries are still going to see growth, I fully expect the EU to keep shooting itself in the foot (like it did with its car industry, destroying it with regulations and handing over the EU EV car market to China).
Those who can do do, losers who cannot do regulate.
The AI vendors will NEVER fix any system flaws that can be ignored or hidden. Only a public database can force these into the open.
Telling lies basically.
The rules require tracking outputs, which open-weight models cannot do. So I'm wondering if open-weight models have separate rules or this effectively bans releasing such models.
Trying to understand the rules but it doesn't seem to make a clear distinction between these things. I assume that they are intending the applications that use the models, not the models.
To me, "ask" connotes that compliance is voluntary. Which in some circumstances strikes me as an intentional, rhetorical lie.
Where YOU live you can have all the unbridled capitalism as you want - be a product for tech bros and help make some executive a billionaire - I don't care!
Where I live, I want this shit regulated. So, good stuff, EU.
A bit rich when all the companies mentioned are across the pond?
The alternative is much worse, which is having zero say in tracking cookies. I'll take a banner on every single website to have more control of that.
I really don't see the issue. If you really find them annoying, use ublock with a proper cookie banner filter or something like that
Note that's a company page that the EU pays to do it.. the EU government page is even worse. https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
You don't need a cookie banner if you aren't doing anything shady. Using cookies (or other such mechanisms) does not require information or consent popups when they're necessary to make the product/service work for technical reason - the canonical example being session cookies.
The corollary here being, you only need consent popups if you're doing something shady but not strictly illegal. They're not meant to be annoying - they're there because it's illegal to do shady shit without the user agreeing to it, and "agreeing" in the EU means "informed consent". So you have to inform, and then get consent.
It's all pretty reasonable. But of course, people doing shady shit really don't want the users to understand it and risk them not consenting - and they especially hate having to ask in the first place. The industry settled on a "malicious compliance" approach to GDPR - show popups that, as much as they can get away with it, maximize the chance of people consenting to make the popup go away, make the "informed" part as opaque as possible, and generally make this thing super annoying - and then tell people it's all EU's fault, hoping enough Europeans will buy it and the public pressure will make EU undo GDPR.
https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en
If cookie banners were not designed to be required... why does the EU pages themselves use them?
https://gdpr.eu/privacy-policy/
https://european-union.europa.eu/cookies_en
Though again, not ideal IMO; based on skimming those policies, I think they could've set it up so consent popup only shows in specific situations that trigger the need for it. That, and I don't get why they use (a minimal build of) Google Analytics, and let that data fly over to the US (which they explicitly acknowledge). That's just lazy.
Maintaining the same interface as europa.eu is the least risky approach and so everyone does it that way.
If one wants to say "the GDPR doesn't mandate cookie banners" then it should be the GDPR site in europa.eu that demonstrates how that can be done with other styles of cookie consent.
Until then, it is perfectly fair and reasonable to assert that the GDPR requires it because the GDPR site itself uses it and companies that haven't done it that way have gotten fined.
LLM regulation is too late, models are already at chatGPT3.5 or 4 levels, which is enough to do basically anything.
You are confusing intent for ground reality. Its like saying 'we banned drugs' but we still have a drug problem.
Built using the internet, which was invented in America.
> All modern chips are bottle necked by European EUV.
Which uses US tech. My understanding is they have to follow US sanctions even.