ABSTRACT
The research design of this book was guided by two questions. First, how does the AI Act reconcile its role as a single-market legislative measure firmly embedded in the product safety regulatory logic with the ethical promise and imperative to regulate a fast-evolving and partly indeterminate technology? Second, how can the AI Act deliver a governance model capable of sustaining normative certainty and legitimacy? These questions framed the entire trajectory of the analysis. They also shaped the methodological approach we adopted. As we stated in our thesis in Chapter 1, The AI Act constitutes, in many respects, a hybrid regulatory regime, blending different approaches to regulation: market integration with rights-based safeguards and a risk-based model with a principle-based approach. It also establishes a strong co-regulatory environment. In this book we proposed a combination of doctrinal legal research with normative evaluation and analysis that explored the interaction between market logic and ethical claims. By revisiting these research questions in light of the findings, it is now possible to assess what the AI Act achieves, but, more importantly, where it falls short. We believe that what this reveals is much more than the state of European digital regulation.
