compliance e AEO,  free trade agreement,  made in,  valore in dogana

European artificial intelligence act and customs implications

Dicembre 12, 2023 /

On 9 December 2023 the European Commission published a press release on  the “political agreement on Artificial Intelligence Act”.

According to this document: “…The new rules will be applied directly in the same way across all Member States, based on a future-proof definition of AI….” By following a risk-based approach for which there are two main categories of risks:

  • Minimal risk: “…The vast majority of AI systems fall into the category of minimal risk. Minimal risk applications such as AI-enabled recommender systems or spam filters will benefit from a free-pass and absence of obligations, as these systems present only minimal or no risk for citizens’ rights or safety. On a voluntary basis, companies may nevertheless commit to additional codes of conduct for these AI systems…”
  • High-risk: “…AI systems identified as high-risk will be required to comply with strict requirements, including risk-mitigation systems, high quality of data sets, logging of activity, detailed documentation, clear user information, human oversight, and a high level of robustness, accuracy and cybersecurity. Regulatory sandboxes will facilitate responsible innovation and the development of compliant AI systems…”.
  • Unacceptable risk: AI systems considered a clear threat to the fundamental rights of people will be banned.

The high-risk AI systems include, among other, gas and electricity and border control. Indeed, the WCO in November 2023 declared in “ Research & Policy Note on Generative Artificial Intelligence for Customs”  that “…many Customs authorities, in conjunction with both public and private stakeholders in international trade, will progressively adopt GenAI as part of their systems in the foreseeable future. This assumption is underpinned by several factors: (i) the diversity of GenAI applications that will supplement already well-established AI systems within the public sector; (ii) the intuitive interface made possible by natural language interaction, broadening the scope of end-users; (iii) the extremely rapid spread of this technology throughout society; and (iv) the reaction of governments and organizations in working on trust in AI to be achieved, for example, the G7 Hiroshima process1, the European Union AI Act2, the United States Executive Order on AI3 and the last AI Safety Summit in United Kingdom…”.

The new European AI approach, in our opinion, will impact on:

  1. Negotiation of the European free trade agreements, in particular, for the ones which can be classified as comprehensive. These agreements cover intelelctual property rights managements (IPR), trade, environments, data transfer, services related to the goods.
  2. Compliance evaluation for the AEO which should be managed according the relevance of the AI in: 1) preferential origin processes; 2) made in; 3) customs value and its elements; 4) customs classification processes;
  3. Risk-assessment for the AEO because AI will change the customs-related risk and will need more care from economic operators and customs point of view.

The customs field should reflect some open points of the AI approach: the need to human and legal control the new tecnology. Customs processes will be boosted but they need to be considered as alligned with the compliance required by the AEO standards.