Meet the EU Parliament’s AI chairs: Michael McNamara, Brando Benifei

The European Parliament’s AI monitoring group, tasked with overseeing implementation of the AI Act, will be led by lawmakers Michael McNamara (Ireland/Renew) and Brando Benifei (Italy/S&D), a spokesperson for the EU institution told Euronews.

McNamara will be the group’s co-chair on behalf of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) and Benifei on behalf of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO). 

Benifei led the Parliament’s work on the AI Act in the previous mandate, as one of the co-rapporteurs. McNamara entered the parliament in July after the EU election and was previously a member of the Irish parliament. 

The Legal Affairs committee (JURI) has also requested membership of the cross-parliamentary group, but has not yet made a decision on its representative.

The AI Act – which aims to regulate AI systems according to the risk they pose to society – entered into force early August. The general-purpose AI rules will apply one year after entry into force and the obligations for high-risk systems in three years’ time.

No date has been set for a first meeting, most of their discussions are likely to be closed to the public.

Similar working groups were set up in the Parliament’s last mandate, on the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will continue with the incoming Parliament.

More work on AI is foreseen in both the Parliament and the European Commission’s new legislature, additional rules on the workplace, as well as copyright are expected. 

In addition, the Commission last month announced a list of independent experts from the EU, US and Canada tasked to lead work on drafting a Code of Practice on General Purpose Artificial Intelligence, which includes language models such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

The Code is designed to ease application of the AI Act’s rules for companies, including on transparency and copyright-related rules, systemic risk taxonomy, risk assessment, and mitigation measures.