Laura Caroli
What Is the Code of Practice?
On November 14, 2024, the first draft of the European Union’s General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, established by the EU AI Act, was published by the EU AI Office. According to Article 56 of the AI Act, the code will outline the rules operationalizing the requirements the Regulation sets out for general-purpose AI (GPAI) models (Article 53) and GPAI models with systemic risk (Article 55). The AI Act is a product safety type of legislation and heavily relies on harmonized standards to support compliance with the requirements. Harmonized standards are sets of operational rules established by European standardization bodies, namely the European Committee for Standardization (CEN), the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC), and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, where industry experts as well as, in smaller proportion, civil society and trade unions translate requirements set out by EU sectoral legislation upon a specific mandate by the European Commission.
The commission assesses the proposed standards, and if they respond to the mandate, they will be adopted, becoming so-called harmonized standards. Harmonized standards provide a presumption of conformity to any company using them to comply with the respective legislation. In the field of high-risk AI systems, which constitute the bulk of requirements set out by the AI Act, such standards do not yet exist. CEN and CENELEC are currently working to have them ready by April 2025, in time for the requirements for high-risk AI systems to apply in two years.
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