Hugging Face, along with Creative Commons, Eleuther AI, GitHub, LAION, and Open Future, has released a position paper urging the European Union to consider the unique needs of open-source machine learning development in the final stages of the AI Act. The coalition argues that open, modular, and collaborative ML development is essential for innovation, transparency, and accountability.
The paper outlines five key recommendations:
- Clearly define AI components to avoid ambiguity.
- Ensure that collaborative development and sharing of open-source AI components in public repositories do not impose regulatory burdens on developers.
- Support coordination between the AI Office and the open-source ecosystem.
- Make the research and development exception practical by allowing limited real-world testing.
- Set proportional requirements for foundation models, recognizing different development modalities, including open-source approaches.
The full paper is available here.