AI Regulations: EU Withdraws AI Liability Proposal; US Seeks Comments on AI Action Plan

The EU is withdrawing proposed regulations for handling victim’s claims of harm caused by AI — but it faces internal opposition.

This week, the AI Liability Directive was taken off the 2025 work program of the European Commission, according to Euro News.

The commission, which is the European Union’s executive arm, cited lack of progress in negotiations on the directive.

But legislators in the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee voted to keep working on the rules for artificial intelligence (AI) products. However, the leader of this issue, the Parliament’s Legal Affairs committee, has not yet decided what to do.

The AI Liability Directive was proposed in 2022 alongside the EU AI Act. While the AI Act served to assess risks posed by AI systems and penalize offending organizations, the AI Liability Directive would protect victims by making it easier to prove they were harmed, among other stipulations.

The commission’s change of heart was blasted by Axel Voss, a German member of the European Parliament.

“Why the sudden U-turn? The answer likely lies in pressure from industry lobbyists who view any liability rules as an existential threat to their business models,” Voss told the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP).

“Big Tech firms are terrified of a legal landscape where they could be held accountable for the harms their AI systems cause. Instead of standing up to them, the Commission has caved, throwing European businesses and consumers under the bus in the process,” Voss said.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is asking the public to weigh in on policies for the “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Plan,” being developed by the Trump administration.

The plan seeks comments on which policies to prioritize to “enhance America’s AI dominance and ensure that unnecessarily burdensome requirements do not hamper private sector innovation.”

The Request for Information notice, which was issued by the National Science Foundation on behalf of the OSTP, is seeking comments from the public until March 15, 2025.

Stakeholders include academia; industry groups; state, local and tribal governments; private sector organizations and other interested parties.

The request for comments is broad in scope, and comments can address any relevant AI policy topic. “The topics suggested by the RFI are wide-ranging and could impact nearly every facet of AI development and deployment,” wrote Duane Pozza, Kathleen Scott and Lauren Lerman from the Wiley law firm in a blog post.

They said areas of AI that could be affected include:

• Regulation and governance
• Procurement
• Export controls
• Data privacy, security through the AI life cycle and cybersecurity
• National security and defense
• Data centers, and energy consumption and efficiency
• Hardware and chips
• Model development, and application and use of AI
• Innovation and competition
• Intellectual property

AI is being increasingly used to help write books, create art, compose music and make movies. Thus, a common question that has been asked is whether creations that involved AI use are copyrightable.

In a new report, the U.S. Copyright Office clarified that if AI is used to assist, rather than replace, human creativity, it would not affect its copyrightability.

However, if a piece of creative work was entirely generated by AI, or where there isn’t enough human control over the result, it is not copyrightable. A human using prompts alone to create the work is not enough.

The U.S. Copyright Office also said assessing whether human effort is sufficient to constitute authorship will be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

The post AI Regulations: EU Withdraws AI Liability Proposal; US Seeks Comments on AI Action Plan appeared first on PYMNTS.com.