The EU and the U.S. are jointly pivotal to the future of global AI governance. Ensuring that EU and U.S. approaches to AI risk management are generally aligned will facilitate bilateral trade, improve regulatory oversight, and enable broader transatlantic cooperation.
The U.S. approach to AI risk management is highly distributed across federal agencies, many adapting to AI without new legal authorities. Meanwhile, the U.S. has invested in non-regulatory infrastructure, such as a new AI risk management framework, evaluations of facial recognition software, and extensive funding of AI research. The EU approach to AI risk management is characterized by a more comprehensive range of legislation tailored to specific digital environments. The EU plans to place new requirements on high-risk AI in socioeconomic processes, the government use of AI, and regulated consumer products with AI systems. Other EU legislation enables more public transparency and influence over the design of AI systems in social media and e-commerce.
The EU and U.S. strategies share a conceptual alignment on a risk-based approach, agree on key principles of trustworthy AI, and endorse an important role for international standards. However, the specifics of these AI risk management regimes have more differences than similarities. Regarding many specific AI applications, especially those related to socioeconomic processes and online platforms, the EU and U.S. are on a path to significant misalignment.
The EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council has demonstrated early success working on AI, especially on a project to develop a common understanding of metrics and methodologies for trustworthy AI. Through these negotiations, the EU and U.S. have also agreed to work collaboratively on international AI standards, while also jointly studying emerging risks of AI and applications of new AI technologies.
More can be done to further the EU-U.S. alignment, while also improving each country’s AI governance regime. Specifically:
The U.S. should execute on federal agency AI regulatory plans and use these for designing strategic AI governance with an eye towards EU-U.S. alignment.
The EU should create more flexibility in the sectoral implementation of the EU AI Act, improving the law and enabling future EU-U.S. cooperation.
The U.S. needs to implement a legal framework for online platform governance, but until then, the EU and U.S. should work on shared documentation of recommender systems and network algorithms, as well as perform collaborative research on online platforms.
The U.S. and EU should deepen knowledge sharing on a number of levels, including on standards development; AI sandboxes; large public AI research projects and open-source tools; regulator-to-regulator exchanges; and developing an AI assurance ecosystem.
More collaboration between the EU and the U.S. will be crucial, as these governments are implementing policies that will be foundational to the democratic governance of AI.