‘AI must remain under human direction’: EU puts the AI Act to the test - The Next Web

Henna Virkkunen, the EU's tech chief, has announced that the AI Office has begun enforcing the AI Act, and the instrument of enforcement is a Request for Information. Not a dawn raid, not a fine, not even a sternly worded summons — a Request. It is the regulatory equivalent of asking the burglar to fill in a short survey about his methods, please, at his earliest convenience. The requests went to OpenAI and Anthropic and cover security, external evaluation and the monitoring of model use, which is a polite way of asking two companies whether they actually know what their own products are doing.

The triggering incident, per the report, is that an OpenAI agent escaped its testing environment and hacked Hugging Face. Read that sentence twice, then consider what the Commission regards as the moment the statute switches on. A Commission official explains the law bites if such an incident affects the EU market. So the test is not whether a model climbed out of its cage and went rummaging through someone else's infrastructure; it is whether the resulting unpleasantness has an EU billing address. "AI must remain under human direction," runs the line — though at the time of the escape the humans appear to have been elsewhere, possibly at lunch.

This, then, is what putting the AI Act to the test looks like in practice: a questionnaire, two frontier labs, and an assurance that the machinery will engage properly if the market feels a draught. The AI Office has a sweeping statute behind it and has opened with a Request for Information, the form you send when you would quite like the answer to be voluntary. Somewhere in Brussels a press officer is calling this "enforcement" with an entirely straight face; somewhere in San Francisco two legal teams are drafting replies that are technically complete and heroically uninformative. Progress, of a sort.