AI Dictionary › Regulation
Responsabilità civile per AI
AI liability concerns the set of rules that determine who must answer, and to what extent, for damages caused by an AI system to people, property or rights. It is a distinct but complementary topic to product regulation such as the EU AI Act: while the latter sets preventive requirements for placing a system on the market, liability rules intervene after a harm has occurred, to determine who must compensate for it.
The specific difficulty with AI is that the causal chain is often opaque: harm may stem from flawed training data, an error by the model provider, incorrect implementation by the company using it, or unpredictable interaction between multiple systems. Traditional liability rules, designed for products with deterministic behavior, struggle to adapt to systems that learn and whose output is not always reproducible or explainable.
For companies, this translates into the need to carefully document design decisions, tests performed and the declared limits of the system, partly to defend themselves in case of a dispute. Clear contracts with model providers, dedicated insurance policies and risk-allocation clauses are increasingly common tools in AI-related business practice.
The proposed EU AI Liability Directive (put forward in 2022 to adapt non-contractual liability rules to algorithmic systems) was withdrawn by the European Commission in October 2025. What remains in force is the revised Product Liability Directive, updated in 2024 to explicitly include software and AI systems among the "products" that can be defective: it is now the EU's main instrument for AI-related harm, alongside national non-contractual liability rules.
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