The European Commission is preparing to sacrifice part of its digital laws, including the pioneering regulation of the artificial intelligenceto satisfy the demands of the technological giants and try to compete in the race that the technology industries are currently leading. USA y China.
Next Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen will present an omnibus package to simplify many of the technological laws of the European Union. Although Brussels has sold it as a cosmetic and limited touch-up, internal documents obtained by the MLex portal revealed last week that a “far-reaching” cut of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the regulations that have turned the community bloc into a world reference for privacy.
“It is an attempt to secretly dismantle the strongest protections against digital threats,” warns a letter to which EL PERIÓDICO has had access in which 127 civil society organizations and unions from all over Europa show their “deep alarm” over proposed changes that would cause “the biggest setback of the fundamental rights of the history of the UE“. For these experts in digital governance, the laws under threat are “the best defense we have against digital exploitation and surveillance by both national and foreign actors”.
The ‘apps’ of DeepSeek, ChatGPT and Google Gemini / Andrey Rudakov / Bloomberg
Privacy cuts
The draft of the European Executive indicates that it intends to make some obligations more flexible in the data protection to make it easier for SMEs to comply with the legislation. According to POLITICO, it will also open the door for IA can legally use certain sensitive personal data—such as those related to a person’s religious or political beliefs, ethnicity, or health—to train the systems that shape commercial applications such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude o Grok.
This “will weaken the only clear rule that prevents companies and governments from constantly tracking what people do on their devices” and “will make it easier for those in power to control people’s phones, cars or smart homes, in addition to revealing sensitive information about where they go and with whom,” they warn from civil society.
Archive – Plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg / EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT/DAINA LE LARDIC – Archive
Pause regulations for high-risk AI
The Commission also wants to delay the implementation of part of its landmark AI regulation for at least a year. In practice, that means freezing until August 2027 the rules that limit the deployment of AI systems considered dangerous. high risk because they can endanger fundamental rights. In addition, it contemplates delaying fines against AI-generated content that does not include watermarks to warn users.
European regulation considers high-risk AI systems such as those that track students’ activity to find out if they are cheating during an exam, those that automatically regulate a city’s traffic lights or those used in talking toys, according to the Spanish Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence (AESIA).
With this exemption, leaked yesterday to POLITICO by two European officials, Brussels intends to please large American technology companies such as Apple, Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft y OpenAI who have been pressuring for years to reverse a series of democratically approved laws that they consider to be an impediment to the expansion of their business.
Students during a PAU exam. / Europa Press
Although Brussels publicly denies it, its maneuver responds to pressure from the administration Trumpbut also from the European industry itself. In July, 56 AI companies like the French one Mistral AI or the German Aleph Alpha They demanded to pause and simplify parts of the pioneering regulation definitively approved in May 2024.
With this deregulation, “providers of AI tools could unilaterally and secretly exempt themselves from all obligations and neither the public nor the authorities would know it,” warn the 127 European civil society organizations.
Rejection grows
That amendment to the AI Act It will be part of the simplification package that will be announced on November 19. For it to prosper, Von der Leyen will need the support of the countries of the UE and of European Parliament. member states such as France, Estonia o Denmarkwho holds the presidency of the Council of the EU, call for a radical reform of digital laws, ensuring that the current ones stop the innovationwhile others like Germany They are frontally opposed to it.
The Brussels plan, led by vice president Henna Virkkunenis awakening more and more discomfort. The center and left political groups of the European Parliament This week they sent a letter to the Commission in which they describe the cuts as “extremely worrying” and as a capitulation to the demands of USA. Social Democrats, Liberals and Greens occupy 266 of the 720 seats in the chamber. This opposition could force Von der Leyen to modify the omnibus package or to depend, again, on the extreme right for the approval of his political program.
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