EU co-legislators reach a provisional deal on the AI Act

Background

The AI Act started as a proposal from the European Commission, submitted in April 2021 ^[1]. Under the EU's ordinary legislative procedure the Commission proposes, and two co-legislators — the Council, representing member-state governments, and the directly elected European Parliament — amend the text, and both must agree before it can become law. In practice each institution first fixes its own negotiating position. The Council adopted its position on the rules on 6 December 2022 ^[2].

Once both positions exist, the institutions move into interinstitutional negotiations, often called trilogues, in which representatives of the Council, the Parliament and the Commission meet to converge on a single text. Such talks are where the substantive bargains are struck; what emerges is a provisional agreement, which the institutions must then confirm through their formal procedures.

What happened

Negotiators in the Council and the European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on the AI Act on 8 December 2023 ^[1]. The Commission's page for the legislative file records the deal as reached on 9 December 2023, following three-day "marathon" talks ^[2]. The two records therefore differ by a day: the Council's account dates the agreement to 8 December, while the Commission's file dates it to the day after talks that ran for three days.

Key details

The Council announced the outcome under the title "Artificial intelligence act: Council and Parliament strike a deal on the first rules for AI in the world" ^[2]. That framing is the Council's own description of the file, issued at the point the political agreement was reached.

A provisional agreement is a political deal, not the end of the procedure. The text still had to be tidied by lawyer-linguists, translated, and formally adopted by the institutions involved. In this case the Council gave its formal adoption on 21 May 2024 ^[2], months after the December deal.

The timetable shows how long each stage took. The Commission's proposal dates from April 2021 ^[1]; the Council's own position took until December 2022 ^[2]; the interinstitutional deal came in December 2023 ^[1]; formal adoption by the Council followed in May 2024 ^[2].

Why it matters

The provisional agreement is the moment at which the content of a European law is effectively settled. Negotiations between the two co-legislators determine what obligations the final text contains, and the formal votes that follow are largely confirmation. For a file as broad as rules for artificial intelligence, that moment is the one worth marking, because it is when the political choices are fixed.

The sequence also illustrates how EU law is made in general. A Commission proposal does not become law on its own; it is reshaped by the Parliament and the Council, and the decisive step is the compromise reached between them in negotiation. Reading the AI Act's history through its dates — proposal, Council position, provisional deal, formal adoption — gives a template that applies to many other files.

Finally, the Council presented the agreement as the first rules for AI in the world ^[2], a description that places the file in a wider discussion about how legislatures should treat artificial intelligence. Whether or not that framing is accepted, the December 2023 deal marked the point at which a major jurisdiction moved from proposing AI rules to agreeing on their content.