⏳ The AI Governance Zeitgeist: April 2025
AI's Legal and Ethical Challenges | Edition #191
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⏳ The AI Governance Zeitgeist: April 2025
It's April 2025, and the AI Governance Zeitgeist has already profoundly changed since the beginning of the year. AI is evolving not only technologically but also from a governance perspective.
I'll split this edition into three main topics: politics, law, and work, and discuss how they have been shaped by recent events in AI governance.
1. Politics
As I wrote last week, the EU is bowing to external pressure and radically shifting its narrative on AI governance. Now, it's all about innovation, acceleration, and regulatory simplification.
Henna Virkkunen, the “EU digital chief," promised the audience at the AI Action Summit in February that the EU would simplify its rules and apply them in a business-friendly way. Indeed, the EU announcement that it will simplify the GDPR was one of the main recent developments in this context.
From a legal perspective, it is unclear what this means in practice. It is a political turn, and recent events make the EU's shift even clearer.
Yesterday, it launched its AI Continent Action Plan with the goal of competing with the U.S. and China and making Europe a global leader in AI. These are the plan's core initiatives:
Building a large-scale AI data and computing infrastructure
Increasing access to large and high-quality data
Developing algorithms and fostering AI adoption in strategic EU sectors
Strengthening AI skills and talents
Regulatory simplification
Geopolitical dynamics around AI will look very different in a few years, especially as the EU is trying as much as possible to align itself with the American worldview on AI.
2. Law
Three days ago, the White House announced two memos with the goal of implementing Trump's Executive Order "Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI" from January 23.
One of the memos is titled "Accelerating Federal Use of AI through Innovation, Governance, and Public Trust.” Despite its language and focus on AI innovation and acceleration, it actually contains interesting risk management provisions, including AI impact assessments, for "high-impact AI use cases."
Perhaps unexpectedly for some, the U.S. has, in fact, taken inspiration from the EU AI Act. See how the Memo defines high-impact AI use cases:
"AI with an output that serves as a principal basis for decisions or actions with legal, material, binding, or significant effect on:
1. an individual or entity's civil rights, civil liberties, or privacy;
2. an individual or entity's access to education, housing, insurance, credit, employment, and other programs;
3. an individual or entity's access to critical government resources or services;
4. human health and safety;
5. critical infrastructure or public safety;
6. strategic assets or resources, including high-value property and information marked as sensitive or classified by the Federal Government."
If you're familiar with the EU AI Act, you know that the list above has similarities to the list in Annex III, covering high-risk AI systems.
Interestingly, the Memo also establishes a detailed, non-exhaustive list of purposes for which AI is presumed to be high-impact.
To all Americans who complain about EU overregulation: this type of open-ended, non-exhaustive provision for a high-risk category is actually stricter than the EU AI Act's high-risk classification.
Of course, these AI Policy Memos have a limited scope, and the EU AI Act is much more than an initial risk classification. But especially for those who only read headlines ("Accelerate..." "Innovate..." "Remove Barriers..."), the U.S. also regulates AI, and it is taking inspiration from the EU too.
3. Work
AI is not only a big buzzword; it's also changing how people work and employers’ expectations in the workplace.