Policy

Europe

The European Parliament passed the EU AI Act on March 13th. It still needs formal approval by member countries in May. More information below:

Key points

• Compliance deadline: 2026 (unless building a prohibited technology)
• Applies to all companies in the EU or operating in the EU
• We’ll have to wait for cases brought by the European Parliament to bring more clarity on definition
  → Overview of the act here.

Compliance resources

• EU AI Act compliance checker
• Do foundation model providers comply with the draft EU AI Act?
• The EU’s AI Act and how companies can achieve compliance

More policy developments

• The US is in talks with allies to curb Chinese AI development
• China is raising a $27B chip fund from state enterprises and province governments to curb impact from new US rules
• The UAE announced a new $100B fund (MGX) to invest in AI and semiconductors.
• Brazil convened top officials and experts to discuss AI policy

AI development + deployment

Elections

• AI meme wars hit India election, test social platforms
• Google won’t let you use its Gemini AI to answer questions about an upcoming election in your country

Governance

• OpenAI’s GPT is a recruiter’s dream tool. Tests show there’s racial bias
• Elon Musk says xAI will open-source Grok this week
• OpenAI announces new board members, reinstates CEO Sam Altman
• Midjourney bans all Stability AI employees over alleged data scraping

Security

• Ex-Google engineer arrested for stealing AI technology secrets for China
• Dozens of top scientists sign effort to prevent AI bioweapons
• Listen: AI and making the supply chain more robust

More

• Selective forgetting can help AI learn better
• Singapore startup to invest €3.2B in Italian chips factory

Where AI is going

New applications

• Hong Kong research centre launches AI tool to assist in complex brain surgery procedures
• China puts trust in AI to maintain largest high-speed rail network on Earth
• Researchers hope to create ‘real AI scientists’ through ‘informed machine learning’
• Startup taps AI to bolster nuclear power development

Raises

Empathy closes $47M for AI to help with the practical and emotional bereavement process, Applied Intuition lands $6B valuation for AI-powered autonomous vehicle software, Chinese generative AI start-up Alsphere, raises US$14 million