High quality data and high quality rights: consolidating Europe's AI ambitions with citizen rights

Is AI compatible with citizens’ rights? It all depends on implementation and political will.

Artificial intelligence is becoming a cornerstone of the EU’s competitiveness strategy. But for it to support the EU’s economic ambitions, there must first be a regulatory environment that allows European developers to build and deploy models at scale.

Training competitive AI models that are truly “made in Europe” requires large, diverse datasets that reflect the continent’s diverse cultures, languages and communities. Access to high-quality data is a prerequisite for this development; without it, models may fail to serve diverse populations, from accurately diagnosing medical conditions across different demographics to correctly translating Europe’s many languages and dialects.

However, datasets are typically drawn from the public internet, which is frequently embedded with sensitive personal information. Special Category Data (SCD) – compiling information such as health conditions, religious beliefs, ethnic backgrounds and political opinions – carries the strongest legal protections under European frameworks like the GDPR. Yet it also seeps into the materials used for training large language models, placing SCD at the intersection of two founding commitments of the European project: the protection of privacy rights and the building of a competitive European economy.  

The European Commission’s Digital Omnibus takes a significant step in addressing this tension by introducing a new legal basis for the incidental processing of SCD during AI training, provided developers apply appropriate safeguards. But the design of that framework raises questions about what those safeguards should mean in practice – and whether the current proposals are up to the task.

The questions for policymakers are fundamental: what does meaningful protection of sensitive data look like in the context of AI training — and can it be achieved without sacrificing the diversity and quality of data that makes AI systems genuinely useful? What should the guardrails be for trustworthy design and who should be held accountable when things go wrong? 

How the EU resolves these questions will matter both for the fundamental rights of European citizens and for the capacity of European developers to compete globally. This policymakers’ dinner will convene senior decision-makers, regulators, industry leaders and civil society representatives for a frank conversation about what a workable and rights-respecting framework for SCD in AI training should look like.

This event will be moderated by Dharmendra Kanani, Director of Policy and Programmes and Chief Spokesperson at Friends of Europe.

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