Since February 2, 2025, the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act has been implemented in stages. This landmark act has quickly made waves in the global AI field. The act aims to regulate the use and development of AI to ensure that technological applications meet ethical and safety standards. However, it also brings considerable compliance challenges to enterprises.
The EU's Artificial Intelligence Act clearly prohibits a series of high - risk AI applications, such as social scoring and emotion inference, as they may pose potential threats to personal rights and interests. In addition, the act requires enterprises to strengthen the AI literacy training of their employees to ensure that the development and use of AI systems follow the principles of safety, transparency, and interpretability. For enterprises that violate the regulations, they may face a huge fine of up to 7% of their global annual turnover, which undoubtedly brings heavy compliance cost pressure to enterprises.
For AI enterprises from various countries that intend to expand into the European market, the implementation of the EU AI Act brings both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, the implementation of the act has raised the market access threshold, which may cause some enterprises to have difficulty adapting to the new compliance requirements in the short term, thus affecting their business layout. On the other hand, it also prompts AI enterprises to accelerate technological innovation and compliance construction, and improve product quality and safety to meet the strict standards of the European market. If they can successfully adapt to these rules, enterprises will gain a broader development space in the European market.
Against this backdrop, the open - source models of the Chinese team DeepSeek have rapidly emerged, providing a new option for global enterprises. The open - source models such as DeepSeek V3 and R1 cost only 1/263 of closed - source models, and their technical capabilities are comparable to GPT - 4o, having significant advantages in performance and cost. The transparency and customizability of open - source models enable enterprises to better control the operation of AI systems and reduce compliance risks. By disclosing source codes and algorithms, enterprises can more easily prove the safety and compliance of their AI systems to regulatory authorities.
In addition, the open - source ecosystem has also promoted collaboration and communication among AI developers around the world, accelerating the pace of technological innovation. Enterprises can obtain more technical support and resources in the open - source community, jointly address the challenges in the development of AI, and further reduce compliance costs.
To gain an in - depth understanding of how multinational enterprises should respond to the EU AI Act, we interviewed legal expert [Expert Name]. The expert stated that multinational enterprises should first comprehensively assess their own AI businesses and identify potential compliance risk points. At the technical level, strengthen the security and privacy protection measures of AI systems to ensure the legal use and storage of data. At the same time, establish a sound internal compliance management system, conduct self - inspections and self - corrections regularly, and promptly discover and solve compliance problems.
In terms of response strategies, enterprises can consider collaborating with local legal and technical experts to formulate an AI development strategy that complies with EU regulations. In addition, actively participating in the construction of the open - source ecosystem and taking advantage of the benefits of open - source models to reduce compliance costs is also a feasible approach.
With the entry into force of the EU AI Act, the global AI industry landscape is undergoing profound changes. In the future, how to give full play to the advantages of AI technology under the premise of compliance will be an important issue faced by enterprises. We look forward to seeing more innovative AI solutions to promote the healthy development of the global AI industry.
