EU Commission bans AI agents in online meetings

The European Commission bans AI agents in its online meetings. The assistance tools have been excluded from meetings since the beginning of April. The rule apparently applied for the first time at a digital meeting with representatives of the European Digital Innovation Hubs Network, a network of non-profit organizations that aim to support the digitalization of business and administration.

The new rule appears on the second slide of the presentation shown at this meeting. It is about the meeting rules: Tips on how to correctly identify yourself and speak up if you have questions, or the advice that you should mute your microphone. It also contains the information that no AI agents may be used: "No AI agents are allowed."

The EU Commission confirmed to Politico that it had recently established the basic rule for online meetings that AI agents are prohibited. However, the Commission did not comment on the reasons for this.

AI agents can do more than just play question-and-answer games

Agents are special AI models. They can automatically process complex tasks and questions while constantly questioning and correcting themselves. For example, AI agents can also take part in a meeting on behalf of a human, "take notes" and summarize the content afterward. Hallucinations, i.e., imagined information that was not even discussed in the meeting, cannot be ruled out. It is also questionable what happens to the data. Some AI agents can forward this data for processing and may also reveal information that was not intended for AI companies or even their training data sets.

Many large AI providers have already published or announced their AI agents. OpenAI, for example, has released its "Operator" and Perplexity its "Assistant". Microsoft announced new agents for Microsoft Copilot at the end of March. Zoom also offers agents for Workplaces that can take over precisely such meeting summaries.

The agents differ greatly in terms of scope and, in some cases, how they work. While some AI agents are specialized in individual tasks and thus correspond to automation in the job, for example, other agents can act very independently on the Internet.

(gref)