The Fight to Define When AI Is ‘High Risk’

Senior policy analyst Ben Mueller was author of the Center for Data Innovation study. He says his figure takes into account the cost of a quality management system, a regulatory compliance standard that costs hundreds of thousands of euros to set up. European Commission staff said that the cost of a quality management system is not taken into account in the EU’s impact assessment, because most companies making AI systems already have such regulatory systems in place and to do so would be “misleading.”

“The debate rests on what fraction of AI systems will be deemed high risk,” Mueller said, pointing to a segment of the EU’s impact assessment report that said the definition of high risk will determine how much of AI development spending goes toward compliance costs.