The European Parliament — the institution that wrote the world's first comprehensive AI law — has decided that it will not use AI itself. Parliamentary authorities have blocked the rollout of AI productivity tools for staff and MEPs, citing concerns about cybersecurity vulnerabilities and inadequate data protection safeguards, according to a report by Politico Europe.
The irony is almost too clean to leave unremarked. The Parliament spent three years negotiating the EU AI Act — the most sweeping regulatory framework for artificial intelligence ever enacted, covering risk categorisation, transparency requirements, and prohibited AI practices. It entered into force in August 2024. And now the institution that produced it has concluded that it cannot trust AI tools enough to let its own civil servants use them.
The specific tools blocked include AI-assisted drafting, search, and summarisation features that technology vendors had proposed deploying across the Parliament's internal systems. The Parliament's cybersecurity and data protection officers raised objections over two primary concerns: first, that the underlying AI models could not guarantee that sensitive political and legislative data would not be used for model training or exposed to third parties; second, that the tools had not undergone sufficiently rigorous security assessment to be deployed in an institution that handles classified information and confidential inter-institutional communications.
Both objections are, taken on their merits, reasonable. The AI Act's own risk framework would classify tools handling sensitive parliamentary data as high-risk systems requiring extensive compliance documentation. The irony is not that the Parliament is wrong to be cautious — it is that the institution spent years assuring the technology industry, and the public, that the AI Act provided a workable framework for safe AI deployment. Its own IT officers have now effectively said: not workable enough for us.
The decision will delight critics of the AI Act who argued throughout the negotiations that the framework's compliance requirements were unworkable in practice. It will also discomfit those within the Parliament who positioned the AI Act as Europe's competitive advantage — proof that the EU could regulate AI without stifling innovation. Blocking AI in your own building is not the strongest advertisement for that argument.
For the technology industry, the practical consequences are limited: the Parliament is not a large enterprise customer. But the symbolic consequences are not. The EU's AI regulatory credibility rests partly on the assumption that its institutions are capable of implementing the framework they designed. That assumption has just taken a knock — delivered, with impeccable timing, from inside the building.
