James Geoghegan (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)

I thank the witnesses. This has been really informative and helpful. One of the things that I keep emphasising at this committee, and it is worth emphasising, is that if you think of China, the United States and Europe, AI is operating in a fully regulated environment in only one of those entities. By "fully", I mean that there is regulation. You can quibble about how that regulation is written and the extent to which more regulation could be introduced, but there is a regulatory requirement in Europe that just does not exist in China or the United States. In the United States, what we are seeing right now is actually a divergence where individual states are taking a regulatory approach that is different from that of the federal state.

Europe has an enormous opportunity even if the technology, such as the large language models, has not been developed within Europe. Most of the models have been developed outside of Europe. That level of certainty should be attractive for enterprise. On the AI Act, Ms Keatinge mentioned the Netherlands example in 2018, which I suppose may well have involved AI but it predates the turbocharging of AI as we now think of it. Would she consider that the AI Act is progress in terms of how a citizen interacts in the digital world in Europe?