We have spent a lot of time reading and analyzing the AI Act. Our summary overview of the EU AI Act has now been published by my colleague Joana Becker and myself in the German law journal “Der Betrieb” ed. 14/2024. The article summarizes content and obligations under the AI Act and gives a recommendation to organizations for next preparatory steps to get “AI ready”. 

The core concept of the AI Act is the “AI system”. Organizations developing or using AI Systems have to comply with the AI Act. The AI System is defined as follows in Art. 3 para. 1 AI Act: "‘.. means a machine-based system designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy, that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments;" will occupy organizations intensively in the future as its crucial to the applicability of the Act.  The central word around which the interpretation will revolve is the word "infers". This expresses the autonomy of AI and excludes, for example, current spreadsheet software from the definition of AI.

We do have a few private copies of this publication in German original and English convenience translation. If you do not have access to “Der Betrieb” and are interested in reading, please contact Joana or me. 

A special THANK YOU to our legal trainees Elias Sommer and Lena-Marie Christnacht (based in our Reed Smith Munich office) whose research and contributions were a major foundation for the article!