The AI Act as a regulatory framework for technology: the rationales for regulation at the EU level revisited

In the first part of the thesis, which takes the choice to regulate the market as a starting point, the author reconceptualises or revisits the well-known, often used but less often questions notions of regulation, economic, social, rights-based and risk regulation. He subsequently uses those concepts to lay bare how the EU legislator, in the framework of the internal market and harmonisation based on Article 114 TFEU, oftentimes relies on an implicit combination of regulatory rationales to justify the adoption of a harmonising instrument. Those rationales, the author nevertheless submits, are not always fully coherent with each other and require more explicit attention at the stage of regulatory designs. To arrive at that conclusion, he has revisited in an impressive manner the theoretical literature on regulation and regulatory rationales prior to outlining how those rationales come to play in the internal market.

The second part of the thesis goes to the heart of his research question and asks whether, in the framework of technology regulation – applied to the field of AI Regulation – this problem emerges with the same degree of intensity or whether the legislator, given the issues inherently associated with technological uncertainties, has taken a more explicit and coherent approach. After drawing out, in two chapters, the specifics of technology and technology regulation, he subsequently and in a very detailed manner analyses the AI Act and the provisions it contains. That analysis allows him to conclude that the AI Act (based on Article 114 TFEU) suffers from the same defects as previous internal market regulations. As a result, he develops a series of constructive suggestions to make regulatory rationales more implicit and to ensure coherence among them. In that regard, he makes tailored suggestions to make justifications for the AI Act more explicit, but also develops the basics for a framework that could be used to analyse other instruments of EU technology regulation.