The European Commission proposes an Ecosystem of Trust regulatory framework to protect fundamental rights, with a focus on high-risk AI systems. The Commission hopes that the proposed framework will give citizens the confidence to use AI applications while giving companies and public organisations the legal certainty to innovate using AI. Through increased confidence and legal certainty, the framework is expected to increase the speed in which AI is adopted.

This paper argues that regarding the scope of regulation, the new framework should effectively achieve its goals without being excessively burdensome, especially applications that are not high-risk and for SMEs. To determine whether an application is high-risk, the Commission suggests looking at the sector in which the application is deployed and the use of the application.