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New AI regulation in the EU seeks to reduce risk without assessing public benefit

Nature Medicine (2024)Cite this article

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The European Union’s new AI Act focuses on risk without considering benefits, which could hinder the development of new technology while failing to protect the public.

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Fig. 1: The AI Act tailors regulation to different levels of presumed risk.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Platform Governance of Digital Practices, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Barbara Prainsack & Nikolaus Forgó

  2. Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Barbara Prainsack

  3. Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin, Germany

    Barbara Prainsack

  4. Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Nikolaus Forgó

Authors
  1. Barbara Prainsack
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  2. Nikolaus Forgó
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Correspondence to Barbara Prainsack.

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Competing interests

B.P. is a member of the Austrian National Bioethics Commission, and Chair of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE). N.F. is a member of the Austrian Data Protection Board and the AI Board, both independent consultancy bodies to the Austrian Government, and also serves as principal investigator in several European Union-funded research projects on AI (full list: https://id.univie.ac.at/en/third-party-funded-projects/). This Comment was written in a personal academic capacity by both authors.

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Prainsack, B., Forgó, N. New AI regulation in the EU seeks to reduce risk without assessing public benefit. Nat Med (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-02874-2

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