BRUSSELS — Centrist parties backing European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen clashed at Thursday’s European Parliament plenary over whether to hold artificial intelligence firms accountable for harm.
The EU executive had considered specific liability rules for AI in 2022, but withdrew these last year as part of the EU’s major simplification effort to make the bloc more competitive.
“To withdraw the AI liability directive was a big mistake,” said Alex Agius Saliba, a Maltese vice-president of the Socialists and Democrats, part of the majority coalition. “We strongly urge the Commission to bring forward this important piece of legislation.”
Thursday’s plenary debate, in which discussions centered on a global framework to regulate AI, showed strong tensions inside Europe between the centrist coalition backing von der Leyen. While the center-left pushed for new rules to address a series of AI-fueled hacking incidents, the center-right doubled down on simplification to ensure European companies can compete in the global AI race.
Socialist and Green lawmakers called for a new AI Liability Act in a bid to hold AI companies liable for harm done by their models, as with more traditional manufacturers’ products.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman floated a similar idea for a new liability framework for companies whose models are capable of autonomous cyberattacks in the wake of this summer’s hack by autonomous OpenAI agents into another AI platform, Hugging Face.
“If a phone charger explodes in your house, we never call it innovative. We call it cheap, dangerous junk, and we hold the manufacturer liable for damages,” said Dutch Green European Parliament lawmaker Kim van Sparrentak.
She urged the Commission to “stop scrapping rules to please [U.S. President Donald] Trump” and come up with a “strong new liability act that covers the testing and the development of AI.”
The debate quickly descended into a fierce back-and-forth between key AI-focused lawmakers from von der Leyen’s centrist coalition.
“It feels [to] me like the Greens and the Socialists are living [on] a completely different planet than the rest of us when they are screaming for more regulation,” said Swedish center-right lawmaker Arba Kokalari, who led the work on the AI omnibus, which delayed a core section of the EU’s flagship AI law.
She said the EU already had a comprehensive regulatory framework — the AI Act — of which some parts are not even into force, and said the EU should focus on avoiding falling behind in the global AI race instead. She called for “less bureaucracy, more private investments, better access to data and computing infrastructure.”
Italian Social Democrat Brando Benifei, who led work on the AI Act in the previous mandate, snapped back that Europe should lead with new liability rules, “or we will need to wait for the next blogpost of a CEO to know what is happening.”
German Green lawmaker Sergey Lagodinsky also fired back at Kokalari: “What planet do you live on? Not on the planet where [AI] agents break out.”
International Partnerships Commissioner Jozef Síkela pointed out at the end of the debate that the rules were withdrawn because EU countries and European Parliament lawmakers couldn’t reach an agreement on them.