Is your AI system illegal in the EU? | Hacker News Reader

Is your AI system illegal in the EU?

medium.com

25 pointspbacdf58 comments

The answers is: likely yes, but the solution is to become the market leader now and pay the fines later. This buisness strategy has worked out very well for the magnificent 7.

You shouldn't care - especially if you're not located in the EU.

The AI Act applies to you if:

- You provide AI systems used in the EU (regardless of where you’re based)

- You import or distribute AI systems in the EU

- You use AI systems in your business operations in the EU

In other words: if your AI touches the EU market in any way, you’re covered. Anytime an EU user consumes your product, you’re accountable.

Not once the GRANITE Act arrives.

As far as I'm aware that's currently just a blog post from the Kiwi Farms lawyer, not a bill.

The New Hampshire proposed state law?

>regardless of where you’re based

This isn't true.

Sounds like an EU problem to me.

> The AI Act applies to you [...] regardless of where you’re based

By what mechanism? Extradition?

Same with Thailand's lese majeste laws. Better hope nobody on your site writes "Vajiralongkorn the King of Thailand is an impotent jerkface."

If the EU tried to innovate as hard on technology as they did regulations, imagine how far they’d be…

This trope is tiring.

* We're leading the world in fusion research. https://www.pppl.gov/news/2025/wendelstein-7-x-sets-new-perf...

* Our satellites are giving us by far the best understanding of our universe, capturing one third of the visible sky in incredible detail - just check out this mission update video if you want your mind blown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXCBFlIpvfQ

* Not only that, the Copernicus mission is the world's leading source for open data geoobservation: https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/

* We've given the world mRNA vaccines to solve the Covid crisis and GLP-1 antagonists to solve the obesity crisis.

* CERN and is figuring out questions about the fundamental nature of the universe, with the LHC being by far the largest particle accelerator in the world, an engineering precision feat that couldn't have been accomplished anywhere else.

Innovation isn't just about the latest tech fad. It's about fundamental research on how our universe works. Everyone else is downstream of us.

Along the same lines, if the US tried to innovate as hard on regulations as they do on technology maybe we wouldn't be destroying the world.

Citation needed. I just checked and the world is still intact.

You have to leave your room first.

Comparing the two, Europe is in a pretty good place right now thanks to its regulations. I'm glad it isn't as "far" and there are still some vestiges of treating people as humans.

Meanwhile thousands of Americans don't have access to lead free running water, your public transportation system is about as good as ours from 150 years ago, parents have to be back in the office instantly after having a baby, if you don't have insurance a cancer will bankrupt you, your average lifespan is going down, &c.

Keep your llms and iphones, we're more than fine on our side lmao

Virtually everyone complies with GDPR.

Unless you want to be able to sell to a market twice as big as the US, of course.

This is innumerate bordering on the delusional.

The EU consists of roughly 500M well-off consumers, the US of roughly 300M.

Maybe not quite double, but almost.

And a GDP 2/3 the size. And way less than that by disposable income.

Even users from "rich" EU countries are worth ~30% of a US user to most companies.

Doesn't matter. Rich enough to afford most products, as pretty much the only market other than the US. And more people. Biggest addressable market for most things.

So what? Even people living in poor EU countries buy iphones, use windows, watch Netflix

If the market was at best 1/3rd of the US no one would bother implementing all these regulations

And yet Apple, Microsoft and Netflix make significantly more revenue from the US than the EU. It's almost as if the EU is not actually a bigger market.

Or maybe their products just aren't that compelling ;-)

Yeah, it's definitely not the low purchasing power.

Like I said, delusional.

This is not sound legal advice. Even Elon learned a lesson about that recently.

The definition of AI is a lot broader than LLMs, and probably a lot broader than machine learning. From Recital 12

> The techniques that enable inference while building an AI system include machine learning approaches that learn from data how to achieve certain objectives, and logic- and knowledge-based approaches that infer from encoded knowledge or symbolic representation of the task to be solved.

That is just a snippe t and I do not know how to interpret it as a whole but it sound as though it atleast extends to expert systems and genetic algorithms? Prolog maybe?

I don't live in EU - boom - problem solved

But the world's largest market of wealthy customers does.

Might still be a problem.

The EU represents about 24% of the global Saas market for example. (95 billion in 2024 / global SaaS market in 2025 is ~ $408 billion). For comparison, North America leads globally at around 43-50% market share)

The EU represents around 500 million wealthy consumers compared to the US's around 300.

Yeah, which is why the EU has a much larger GDP. Global companies make significantly more revenue in the EU than in the US. And of course the EU economy is growing much faster than the US and doesn’t face any demographic headwinds.

Oh, wait.

That is completely orthogonal to my point.

You can only sell so many iPhones in the US until the market is completely saturated. A market of twice as many people that can afford them sure is tempting.

maybe it’d be cool if this EU market with all these people can find a few smart ones to gang up together and form a company that serves EU people and complies with whatever EU dreams up on any given day - boom - problem solved :)

It's quite amazing how arrogant Americans are despite being a thing for like 10 generations, and how brainwashed they are into believing regulations are bad, to the point of being borderline enraged by the fact that the EU exists. You might want to open a few history books, or books in general, and look up the history of your all American inventions

cool mate, you should then enjoy your inventions and ingenuity from Greek Gods and stuff and maybe read a book or two on AI by Plato :-) Too funny (and I am European)

Clearly nothing happened in Europe between plato and 2025...

What about all the AI meeting recording bots that are constantly joining meetings (sometimes even privileged communications in legal matters) or those where two party consent isn’t given? It seems like just nobody cares that this is an issue and it’s becoming acceptable to just violate confidentiality, privilege, and recording laws because “convenience.”

The post makes quite the leap imo. That list is nuanced and basically it should not make a judgment, not what they say.

The article doesnt link to a single source. Missed chance

It links to annex 3, and you can find everything at https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/

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