BRUSSELS — Centrist parties backing European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen clashed at Thursday’s European Parliament plenary over whether to hold artificial intelligence firms accountable for harm. The EU executive had considered specific liability rules for AI in 2022, but withdrew these last year as part of the EU’s major simplification effort to make the bloc more competitive. While the center-left pushed for new rules to address a series of AI-fueled hacking incidents, the center-right doubled down on simplification to ensure European companies can compete in the global AI race.
Socialist and Green lawmakers called for a new AI Liability Act in a bid to hold AI companies liable for harm done by their models, as with more traditional manufacturers’ products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman floated a similar idea for a new liability framework for companies whose models are capable of autonomous cyberattacks in the wake of this summer’s hack by autonomous OpenAI agents into another AI platform, Hugging Face. We call it cheap, dangerous junk, and we hold the manufacturer liable for damages,” said Dutch Green European Parliament lawmaker Kim van Sparrentak.
She urged the Commission to “stop scrapping rules to please [U.S. President Donald] Trump” and come up with a “strong new liability act that covers the testing and the development of AI.” The debate quickly descended into a fierce back-and-forth between key AI-focused lawmakers from von der Leyen’s centrist coalition. She said the EU already had a comprehensive regulatory framework — the AI Act — of which some parts are not even into force, and said the EU should focus on avoiding falling behind in the global AI race instead.
She called for “less bureaucracy, more private investments, better access to data and computing infrastructure.” Italian Social Democrat Brando Benifei, who led work on the AI Act in the previous mandate, snapped back that Europe should lead with new liability rules, “or we will need to wait for the next blogpost of a CEO to know what is happening.” German Green lawmaker Sergey Lagodinsky also fired back at Kokalari: “What planet do you live on? Not on the planet where [AI] agents break out.” International Partnerships Commissioner Jozef Síkela pointed out at the end of the debate that the rules were withdrawn because EU countries and European Parliament lawmakers couldn’t reach an agreement on them.
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