### Legal Framework
#### 1.6.2 AI Act  
The processes for developing the EU AI Act started in April 2021 when the European Commission introduced the AI framework. In December 2022, the European Council approved negotiations with the European Parliament, leading to an agreement as of December 2023 to ensure AI systems in the EU meet standards for safety, transparency, traceability, non-discrimination, and sustainability, while fostering innovation. The European Parliament voted in favor of the Act on 13 March 2024 [15] the text was published in the official EU Journal on 12 July 2024 [11] and came into force on 1 August 2024. While the AI Act predominantly relies on national authorities for enforcement, similar to the GDPR, it also incorporates stronger centralized oversight through the EU Commission and the newly established AI Office. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [30] warn that this hybrid approach may lead to challenges like uneven enforcement across member states, echoing issues seen with the GDPR, but suggest that the enhanced central coordination could mitigate some of these potential problems. The AI Act introduces a risk-based categorization system for AI, ranging from \"unacceptable risk\" to \"high risk\" and \"limited risk\", each with specific regulations. It includes general-purpose and generative AI systems that encompass technologies such as Chat-GPT [11], requiring adherence to transparency standards and high-impact evaluations. Covering a wide array of AI applications, the AI Act ensures safe and ethical AI development, upholding EU values, protecting rights, and building user trust. It mandates AI technologies to prioritize human needs, safety, and legal standards, as per the EU Charterof Fundamental Rights [26]. The regulation applies to both EU-based and external AI Providers whose outputs are used within the EU. As per the Act's key definitions (Art. 3), an AI system is \"a machine-based system designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy, that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments\". A Provider is the entity that \"develops an AI system or a general-purpose AI model or that has an AI system or a general-purpose AI model developed and places it on the market\", whilst a Deployer is \"the entity that uses an AI system\". Under the AI Act (Article 5), certain AI applications are being considered extremely risky in terms of potentially violating human rights and, thus, are prohibited. These include the following:  
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* Deceptive AI Practices: AI systems exploiting vulnerabilities in particular groups (e.g., age, physical, or mental disability) to substantially influence a person's behavior potentially resulting in physical or psychological harm to that individual or others;
* Government Social Scoring: Use of AI systems by governments to assess the individual's reliability over time based on their social status or personal traits, leading to negative outcomes for specific individuals or groups in social settings unrelated to the original data gathering context;
* Real-time Biometric Identification Systems for Law Enforcement: The use of AI systems to identify individuals remotely through biometric data in public spaces is generally prohibited, except for certain cases (such as searching for crime victims, preventing a particular and imminent terrorist threat or identifying and prosecuting a criminal offender or suspect). The AI Act classifies AI systems based on the risks they pose to safety, rights, and freedoms (Article 6). It categorizes AI systems into four primary groups:  
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* Unacceptable Risk: AI systems that threaten safety, well-being, and rights are prohibited in the EU. This includes AI exploiting vulnerabilities in specific groups (e.g., age and disabilities) to alter behavior harmfully and government social scoring systems.