Hello and welcome to this Fieldfisher podcast on the EU AI Act.

My name is Olivia Proust. I'm a partner in the Tech and Data team at Fieldfisher in our Brussels office.

I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the latest events and developments that we have seen on the EU Artificial Intelligence Act.

For those who may know, the European Commission made a proposal to regulate artificial intelligence back in April of 2021.

Now, last Friday, that was on the 8th of December, we saw an unexpected development

when the two co-legislative bodies, that is the Parliament and the Council, with the European Commission,

reached a political agreement.

Thank you. with the European Commission reached a political agreement. Now, this was a little bit unexpected, given some of the political drama that we saw in the last couple of weeks,

particularly focusing on foundation models. And you may have heard that some of the member states,

namely France, Germany and Italy, gave some heavy pushback on some of the proposals that

had been put forward by the European Parliament to regulate general purpose artificial

intelligence and foundation models. So there was a little bit of uncertainty as to whether the AI Act would get adopted

before the European Parliament elections that will take place in June of next year

and before the European Parliament goes into recess.

Now, it seems that there was a strong political will,

and especially the EU Commissioner

Thierre Breton, who was behind the text, was really instrumental in reaching a deal and making

sure that a political agreement was reached. For those who may not know, the Trilog meetings

are meetings between the three European institutions that happen behind closed doors where they

essentially discuss the text and try to reach an agreement on the content of the law. In the end,

the co-legislators did manage to reach a deal and the objective, which was to adopt the AI Act,

prevailed over the differences that we saw between

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