The AI Act was revised. But who shaped the evidence behind that decision? On 29 June, the EU gave its final green light to the Digital Omnibus AI package, revising parts of the AI Act before many of its obligations had even entered into force.
The European Commission additionally relied on an AI Pact survey to support claims that compliance costs were too high. But we wanted to know:
-Who responded to that survey?
-Was the evidence representative of the broader AI ecosystem?
To find out, Homo Digitalis submitted an access-to-documents request to the European Commission, DG CONNECT. They refused to disclose the identities of the respondents, but our request still revealed something important:
Only 44 out of more than 230 AI Pact companies participated in the survey.
Nearly half of those respondents were companies with more than 750 employees.
We also asked for an anonymous breakdown by company size, sector, and geography so that the public could better assess the survey’s representativeness. That information was not meaningfully provided.
When survey evidence is used to justify changes to EU law, citizens should be able to scrutinize whether that evidence is representative, robust, and worthy of informing public policy. That’s why we have now submitted a confirmatory application, asking the European Commission to review its decision.
Read our FOIA and the documents shared by the European Commission here: https://lnkd.in/dyRuAu8S