The EU AI Act Newsletter #104: Experts Take Their Seats

Welcome to the EU AI Act Newsletter, a brief biweekly newsletter by the Future of Life Institute providing you with up-to-date developments and analyses of the EU artificial intelligence law.

AI Act Scientific Panel announced: The European Commission has established the Scientific Panel as an expert advisory body under Article 68 of the AI Act to support the implementation and enforcement of the AI Act. To this end, 60 world-class independent AI experts have been appointed to advise the AI Office and national authorities on implementation and assessment of the impacts and risks of General-Purpose AI (GPAI) models. Their core responsibilities include alerting the AI Office to systemic risks, advising on GPAI classification and evaluation methodologies, and supporting market surveillance activities, a role that complements the broader stakeholder input provided by the Advisory Forum. The selected experts span fields such as GPAI capability evaluation, risk assessment, technical mitigations, misuse and cyber offence risks, provider cybersecurity, and compute measurement. Appointed in their personal capacity for a renewable two-year term, they were chosen with attention to geographic and gender balance, with a chair and vice-chair to follow.

AI Act Advisory Forum: Alongside the Scientific Panel, the European Commission has established the Advisory Forum under Article 67 of the AI Act as a general advisory body to the Commission and the AI Board, supporting the implementation and enforcement of the AI Act. Selected from more than 700 applications, the 174 members are drawn from civil society, academia and industry, including SMEs and start-ups, and they provide technical expertise on a broad range of matters, such as standardisation and implementation challenges. Serving two-year terms that are renewable once, members are expected to engage actively in plenary meetings and thematic subgroups and to offer opinions, recommendations and written contributions at the request of the AI Board or the Commission. Permanent members include the Fundamental Rights Agency, ENISA, CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, with the AI Office able to invite further stakeholders as observers.

Commission publishes Code of Practice on marking and labelling AI-generated content: The European Commission has published the final Code of Practice on marking and labelling of AI-generated content, a voluntary instrument that sets out practical steps to help providers and deployers of generative AI systems meet the AI Act transparency obligations applying from 2 August 2026. Deepfakes and AI-generated or AI-manipulated text published on matters of public interest must be clearly marked, while users must also be informed when they are interacting with an interactive AI system such as a chatbot. The Code was drafted by six independent experts with input from more than 180 stakeholders, ranging from providers and deployers to SMEs, academia, the public sector and civil society. It is organised into two sections, one addressing how providers should mark generated or manipulated content in a machine-readable way, and another explaining how deployers must label deepfakes and public-interest text produced without human review. Complementing the rules on general-purpose AI and high-risk systems, the Code is now open for signatures and will be accompanied by Commission guidelines clarifying the scope of the obligations.

Ireland targets AI Omnibus and child safety in EU presidency agenda: Liz Carolan, a fellow at Tech Policy Press, examines the government policy programme published by Helen McEntee, Ireland’s minister for foreign affairs, ahead of the country’s rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union. The 68-page document, which expands on three themes McEntee set out earlier this year — competitiveness, values and security — signals an intention to aggressively roll back parts of the EU’s digital regulatory framework during the six-month term beginning 1 July, while also advancing measures on child online safety, justice and migration. In pursuing the EU’s “simplification agenda”, the programme adopts the framing that “simplification is about better regulation, not deregulation”, thereby acknowledging concerns from civil society and some member states. For Ireland, the most immediate task is the Digital Omnibus on AI, a package of amendments to the AI Act; although the Parliament and Council reached a provisional agreement in May, it has not yet been formally adopted. Without approval, the original high-risk compliance deadline of 2 August 2026 remains, whereas the Omnibus would push it back to December 2027 at the earliest and loosen protections around personal data use.

Latin America follows EU model on regulation: Journalist Ann Deslandes reports in International Bar Association on how Chile is emerging as a regional leader, having spearheaded the February launch of Latam-GPT, the first open-source AI language model trained on Latin American data. As countries weigh whether to draw inspiration from the EU or the US, recent initiatives suggest a tilt towards Europe: Peru classifies AI systems by risk to human rights, while Brazil, El Salvador and Chile have advanced similar measures. According to IBA Latin American Regional Forum officers Jose Luis Ambrosy and Patricia Silberman, the region’s data protection and cybersecurity rules resemble the EU’s horizontal, risk-based, rights-focused model more than the lighter-touch US approach. Nevertheless, Andrea Saffie warns that following the EU risks over-regulation that strains under-resourced regulators and SMEs, compounded by the region’s legal heterogeneity and differing priority sectors.

Why the EU rewrote its landmark AI law: Peder Schaefer of The Parliament Magazine traces how Ursula von der Leyen’s framing shifted from a law that would “transpose European values to a new era” to one creating “a simple, innovation-friendly environment”. The amendments finalised on 7 May postponed high-risk rules until 2027 or 2028 and removed industrial applications altogether, yet, crucially, left the August timetable for general-purpose AI models intact. Accordingly, Interface researcher Nicole Lemke argues the risk-based architecture endures, while MEP Axel Voss contends the only substantial deregulation was the industrial carve-out. Supporters of the changes cite European competitiveness as the motivation, though it is worth noting that the Act has barely been implemented and no fines have been issued under it; Luka Ignac from Centre for Future Generations, meanwhile, attributes weak European AI innovation more to scarce capital and market fragmentation. The steepest test arrives on 2 August, when enforcement of general-purpose AI rules begins.