European Parliament passes AI Act, challenging tech giants’ power

The European Parliament voted to completely ban real-time, remote biometric surveillance — a decision that will put lawmakers at odds with the EU’s 27 countries in upcoming negotiations. The blanket ban, which was previously agreed by lawmakers, was up in the air after a political deal fell apart late last week.

Lawmakers also passed additional measures for general purpose AI and foundational models like GPT-4. Under the parliament’s plan, companies such as OpenAI and Google would have to perform risk assessments and summarise the copyrighted material used to train their models — regardless of how they’re used.