Mozilla position on Openness & AI in the AI Act

The Mozilla Foundation published a blog post outlining its ideas on Fostering Innovation & Accountability in the EU’s AI Act. In this blogpost they highlight our recent paper on Supporting Open Source and Open Science in the EU AI Act and make two recommendations for EU lawmakers working on finalizing the AI act that echo some of our own recommendations:

1. The AI Act should allow for proportional obligations in the case of open source projects while creating strong guardrails to ensure they are not exploited to hide from legitimate regulatory scrutiny.
2. The AI Act should provide clarity on the criteria by which a project will be judged to determine whether it has crossed the “commercialization” threshold, including revenue.

In a third recommendation, Mozilla highlights the importance of definitional clarity when it comes to regulating open source AI systems. Here Mozilla suggests maintaining a strict definition (that would exclude newer licenses like the RAIL family of licenses) and clarifying which components would need to be licensed under an open license for a system to be considered to be an open source AI system. According to Mozilla this should indicatively apply to models, weights and training data.