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Confusion Reigns In AI Policy In US and Europe

By  |  May 13, 2025

It turns out AI policymaking is hard. On Monday, the British government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer suffered a fresh blow in its push to pass the Data (Use and Access) Bill when the House of Lords voted 272-125 to reattach an amendment requiring AI companies to disclose the copyrighted material used to train their models. The unexpected vote sends the bill back to the House of Commons, which had voted the amendment down last week, setting up another possible round of “Parliamentary ping-pong.”

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    Across the Channel on Tuesday, the head of the European Commission’s AI policy arm, Kilian Gross, signaled an openness to “targeted changes” to the AI Act once the Commission has completed its current review of the law. “Our first focus, of course, will be to simplify the implementation to see what we need to do in order to make it easier for companies” to comply with the regulations,” Gross told POLITICO’s AI & Tech Summit in Brussels. “For the time being, I can say we don’t really envisage to reopen for instance fundamentally the AI Act,” but “if anything happened, it would certainly be targeted.”

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    EU Parliament AI policy advisor Kai Zenner, meanwhile, told a conference in Washington hosted by George Washington University on Friday that EU member countries lack the funds and in-house expertise to effectively enforce the AI Act in any case, Bloomberg Law reported. “Most member states are almost broke,” Zenner said. “This combination of lack of capital finance and also lack of talent will be really one of the main challenges of enforcing the AI Act.”

    Related: Trump Removes Copyright and Library of Congress Leaders After AI Policy Rift

    In the U.S., AI policy was thrown into disarray by the release on Friday of the final installment of the Copyright Office’s report on copyright & AI, which was skeptical of AI companies’ fair use case for their unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train their models. That was followed by the apparent firing of the Register of Copyright Shira Perlmutter by President Trump over the weekend.

    On Monday, the two men purportedly named by Trump as Acting Register and Acting Deputy Librarian of Congress, Paul Perkins and Brian Nieves, respectively, were turned away by security personnel while trying to enter the Copyright Office, Wired reported. The men brandished a letter announcing Todd Blanche, the current Deputy Attorney General, had been named Acting Librarian, and a separate email outlining their own appointments. The staff of the Library, however, has so far declined to recognize Blanche’s appointment as valid and instead have fallen in behind Robert Newlen, the staff official who assumed the role after long-time Librarian Dr. Carla Hayden was dismissed by Trump on Thursday.

    Adding to the confusing swirl of events, the House Republican tax bill released by the Energy and Commerce Committee Sunday evening aims to ban states from regulating AI for 10 years and rolling back state laws that are already on the books via federal preemption. State legislatures have passed at least 113 such laws over the past two years, according to a running tally by the Business Software Alliance.

    The apparent trans-Atlantic chaos is a reflection of how difficult it is to impose workable regulation on a technology evolving as rapidly as artificial intelligence, and of how politically contentious the issue has become. Nearly all major governments see AI as a critical technological component for their country’s future economic growth, and industries have hundreds of billions of dollars riding on its evolution. But translating that into effective policy is proving more daunting than governments and industry may have imagined.