Advertisement Lawmakers and civil society groups say they fear the guidance will be weak to ensure that frontrunning AI companies sign up to the voluntary rules. Ammunition After ChatGPT landed in November 2022, lawmakers and EU countries added a part to the EU’s newly agreed AI law aimed at reining in general-purpose AI models, which can perform several tasks upon request. OpenAI’s GPT is an example, as is xAI’s Grok. That part of the law will take effect in three weeks’ time, on August 2. It outlines a series of obligations for companies such as xAI, including how to disclose the data used to train their models, how they comply with copyright law and how they address various “systemic” risks. The Grok incident “highlights the very real risks the [EU’s] AI Act was designed to address,” said Italian Social-Democrat European Parliament lawmaker Brando Benifei, who led work on the EU’s AI rulebook that entered into law last year. | Wael Hamzeh/EPA But much depends on the voluntary compliance guidance that the Commission has been developing for the past nine months. On Wednesday, a group of five top lawmakers shared their “great concern” over “the last-minute removal of key areas of the code of practice, such as public transparency and the weakening of risk assessment and mitigation provisions.” Those lawmakers see the Grok comments as further proof of the importance of strong guidance, which has been heavily lobbied against by industry and the U.S. administration. Advertisement