Parent company Alphabet’s global affairs president and chief legal officer announced the decision, with some reservations, in a blog post.
Google will sign the European Union’s artificial intelligence code of practice, despite some reservations, the global affairs president of the firm’s parent company, Alphabet, said in a blog post on Wednesday.
“We will join several other companies, including U.S. model providers, in signing the European Union’s General Purpose AI Code of Practice,” Kent Walker, who is also Alphabet’s chief legal officer, said.
“We do so with the hope that this code, as applied, will promote European citizens’ and businesses’ access to secure, first-rate AI tools as they become available.”
However, Walker also sounded a note of caution, saying that Google remains “concerned that the AI Act and Code risk slowing Europe’s development and deployment of AI.”
“In particular, departures from EU copyright law, steps that slow approvals, or requirements that expose trade secrets could chill European model development and deployment, harming Europe’s competitiveness,” he wrote.
The voluntary code of practice, drawn up by 13 independent experts from across Europe and North America, aims to provide legal certainty to signatories on how to meet requirements under the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act.
These include issuing summaries of the content used to train their general-purpose AI models and complying with European copyright law
Microsoft is likely to sign the code, its president, Brad Smith, said earlier this month, while Meta declined to do so and cited the legal uncertainties for model developers.
“I think it’s likely we will sign. We need to read the documents,” Smith said.
In contrast, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, said in a blog post on LinkedIn this month that the company won’t be signing.
Europe is heading down the wrong path on AI,” he said.
“We have carefully reviewed the European Commission’s Code of Practice for general-purpose AI (GPAI) models, and Meta won’t be signing it.
“This code introduces a number of legal uncertainties for model developers, as well as measures which go far beyond the scope of the AI Act.”
The EU enacted the code to set a global standard for AI as its use becomes more prolific, and it was published on July 10 this year.
According to the bloc, the code “will reduce their administrative burden and give them more legal certainty than if they proved compliance through other methods.”
By Guy Birchall
