Google’s AI model faces European Union scrutiny from privacy watchdog

LONDON — European Union regulators said Thursday they’re investigating one of Google’s artificial intelligence models over concerns about its compliance with the bloc’s strict data privacy rules.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said it has opened an inquiry into Google’s Pathways Language Model 2, also known as PaLM2. It’s part of wider efforts, including by other national watchdogs across the 27-nation bloc, to scrutinize how AI systems handle personal data.

Google’s European headquarters are based in Dublin, so the Irish watchdog acts as the company’s lead regulator for the bloc’s privacy rulebook, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

The commission said it wants to know if Google has assessed whether PaLM2’s data processing would likely result in a “high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals” in the EU.

Large language models like PaLM2 are vast troves of data that act as building blocks for artificial intelligence systems. Google uses PaLM2 to power a range of generative AI services including email summarizing. The company said it would assist with the watchdog’s inquiry.

“We take seriously our obligations under the GDPR and will work constructively with the DPC to answer their questions,” Google said in a statement.

The Irish watchdog said earlier this month that Elon Musk’s social media platform X has agreed to permanently stop processing user data for its AI chatbot Grok. The platform did so only after the watchdog took it to court the month before, filing an urgent High Court application to get X to “suspend, restrict or prohibit” processing of personal data contained in public posts by its users.

Meta Platforms paused its plans to use content posted by European users to train the latest version of its large language model after apparent pressure from the Irish regulators. The decision “followed intensive engagement” between the two, the watchdog said in June.

Italy’s data privacy regulator last year temporarily banned ChatGPT because of data privacy breaches and demanded the chatbot’s maker OpenAI meet a set of demands to resolve its concerns.