LONDON, Sept 30 (Reuters) - The European Union has

picked a handful of artificial intelligence experts to decide

how strictly businesses will have to comply with a raft of

incoming regulations governing the technology.

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT

On Monday, the European Commission will convene the first

plenary meeting of working groups -- made up of external experts

-- tasked with drawing up the AI Act's "code of practice", which

will spell out how exactly companies can comply with the

wide-ranging set of laws.

There are four working groups, focused on issues such as

copyright and risk mitigation. Experts selected to oversee the

groups include Canadian scientist and "AI godfather" Yoshua

Bengio, former UK government policy adviser Nitarshan Rajkumar,

and Marietje Schaake, a fellow at Stanford University's Cyber

Policy Center.

Big tech companies such as Google and Microsoft ( MSFT )

will be represented at the working groups, as will a

number of nonprofit organisations and academic experts.

While the code of practice will not be legally binding when

it takes effect in 2024, it will provide firms with a checklist

they can use to demonstrate their compliance. Any company

claiming to follow the law while ignoring the code could face a

legal challenge.

CONTEXT

AI companies are highly resistant to revealing the content

their models have been trained on, describing the information as

a trade secret that could give competitors an unfair advantage

were it made public.

While the AI Act's text says some companies will be obliged

to provide detailed summaries of the data used to train their AI

models, the code of practice is expected to make clearer just

how detailed these summaries will need to be.

One of the EU's four working groups will focus specifically

on issues around transparency and copyright, and possibly result

in companies effectively being forced to publish comprehensive

datasets, leaving them vulnerable to untested legal challenges.

In recent months, a number of prominent tech companies,

including Google and OpenAI have faced lawsuits from creators

claiming their content was improperly used to train their

models.

WHAT'S NEXT

After Monday, the working groups will convene three more

times before a final meeting in April, when they are expected to

present the code of practice to the Commission.

If accepted, companies' compliance efforts will be measured

against the code of practice from August 2025.