EU AI Act

Article 1: Subject Matter

1. The purpose of this Regulation is to improve the functioning of the internal market and promote the uptake of human-centric and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI), while ensuring a high level of protection of health, safety, fundamental rights enshrined in the Charter, including democracy, the rule of law and environmental protection, against the harmful effects of AI systems in the Union and supporting innovation.

Article 59: Further Processing of Personal Data for Developing Certain AI Systems in the Public Interest in the AI Regulatory Sandbox

In the AI regulatory sandbox,, personal data lawfully collected for other purposes may be processed solely for the purpose of developing, training and testing certain AI systems in the sandbox when all of the following conditions are met:

(a) AI systems shall be developed for safeguarding substantial public interest by a public authority or another natural or legal person and in one or more of the following areas:

(i) public safety and public health, including disease detection, diagnosis prevention, control and treatment and improvement of health care systems;

(ii) a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment, protection of biodiversity, protection against pollution, green transition measures, climate change mitigation and adaptation measures;

(iii) energy sustainability;

(iv) safety and resilience of transport systems and mobility, critical infrastructure and networks;

(v) efficiency and quality of public administration and public services;

Article 95: Codes of Conduct for Voluntary Application of Specific Requirements

2. The AI Office and the Member States shall facilitate the drawing up of codes of conduct concerning the voluntary application, including by deployers, of specific requirements to all AI systems, on the basis of clear objectives and key performance indicators to measure the achievement of those objectives, including elements such as, but not limited to:

(b) assessing and minimising the impact of AI systems on environmental sustainability, including as regards energy-efficient programming and techniques for the efficient design, training and use of AI;

Codes of conduct may be drawn up by individual providers or deployers of AI systems or by organisations representing them or by both, including with the involvement of any interested stakeholders and their representative organisations, including civil society organisations and academia. Codes of conduct may cover one or more AI systems taking into account the similarity of the intended purpose of the relevant systems.

The AI Office and the Member States shall take into account the specific interests and needs of SMEs, including start-ups, when encouraging and facilitating the drawing up of codes of conduct.

Recital 165

Providers and, as appropriate, deployers of all AI systems, high-risk or not, and AI models should also be encouraged to apply on a voluntary basis additional requirements related, for example, to the elements of the Union’s Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, environmental sustainability, AI literacy measures, inclusive and diverse design and development of AI systems, including attention to vulnerable persons and accessibility to persons with disability, stakeholders’ participation with the involvement, as appropriate, of relevant stakeholders such as business and civil society organisations, academia, research organisations, trade unions and consumer protection organisations in the design and development of AI systems, and diversity of the development teams, including gender balance. To ensure that the voluntary codes of conduct are effective, they should be based on clear objectives and key performance indicators to measure the achievement of those objectives. They should also be developed in an inclusive way, as appropriate, with the involvement of relevant stakeholders such as business and civil society organisations, academia, research organisations, trade unions and consumer protection organisation. The Commission may develop initiatives, including of a sectoral nature, to facilitate the lowering of technical barriers hindering cross-border exchange of data for AI development, including on data access infrastructure, semantic and technical interoperability of different types of data.

Recital 176

Since the objective of this Regulation, namely to improve the functioning of the internal market and to promote the uptake of human centric and trustworthy AI, while ensuring a high level of protection of health, safety, fundamental rights enshrined in the Charter, including democracy, the rule of law and environmental protection against harmful effects of AI systems in the Union and supporting innovation, cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the action, be better achieved at Union level, the Union may adopt measures in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity as set out in Article 5 TEU. In accordance with the principle of proportionality as set out in that Article, this Regulation does not go beyond what is necessary in order to achieve that objective.

Recital 142

To ensure that AI leads to socially and environmentally beneficial outcomes, Member States are encouraged to support and promote research and development of AI solutions in support of socially and environmentally beneficial outcomes, such as AI-based solutions to increase accessibility for persons with disabilities, tackle socio-economic inequalities, or meet environmental targets, by allocating sufficient resources, including public and Union funding, and, where appropriate and provided that the eligibility and selection criteria are fulfilled, considering in particular projects which pursue such objectives. Such projects should be based on the principle of interdisciplinary cooperation between AI developers, experts on inequality and non-discrimination, accessibility, consumer, environmental, and digital rights, as well as academics.

Recital 4

AI is a fast evolving family of technologies that contributes to a wide array of economic, environmental and societal benefits across the entire spectrum of industries and social activities. By improving prediction, optimising operations and resource allocation, and personalising digital solutions available for individuals and organisations, the use of AI can provide key competitive advantages to undertakings and support socially and environmentally beneficial outcomes, for example in healthcare, agriculture, food safety, education and training, media, sports, culture, infrastructure management, energy, transport and logistics, public services, security, justice, resource and energy efficiency, environmental monitoring, the conservation and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems and climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Hope: The AI Act’s Approach to Address the Environmental Impact of AI

This process requires the European Commission to issue a standardization request for deliverables related to reducing the “consumption of energy and of other resources during its lifecycle” of high-risk AI systems and “energy-efficient development of general-purpose AI models.” In a rush, the Commission had sent a standardization request to the European standardization bodies in May 2023, many months before the AI Act was finalized.

In addition, AI companies also have obligations. A checklist of what AI companies must do is equally meager:

Providers of GPAI models must document the model's energy consumption. When the model's energy consumption is unknown, an estimate based on the use of computational resources is sufficient.

Providers of high-risk AI systems must account for direct or indirect harm to the environment and report them as a serious incident to the regulator.