Editorials

The Irish Times view on AI regulation: Ireland is spreading the burden widely

Ireland has adopted a distributed regulatory model with 15 national competent authorities

A handheld smartphone displaying the icons of some of the main artificial intelligence based apps, including LLMs, chatbots and generative AI, with logos (from L) of Proton AG's Lumo, Meta AI, Mistral Vibe (formerly Le Chat), xAI's Grok, Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity, Deepseek, OpenAI's Chat GPT, Google's Notebook LLM and generative AI music app Suno, in Saint-Mande, east of Paris, on July 15, 2026. Photo: Martin LELIEVRE / AFP via Getty Images
A handheld smartphone displaying the icons of some of the main artificial intelligence based apps, including LLMs, chatbots and generative AI, with logos (from L) of Proton AG's Lumo, Meta AI, Mistral Vibe (formerly Le Chat), xAI's Grok, Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity, Deepseek, OpenAI's Chat GPT, Google's Notebook LLM and generative AI music app Suno, in Saint-Mande, east of Paris, on July 15, 2026. Photo: Martin LELIEVRE / AFP via Getty Images
Mon Aug 10 2026 - 20:00 • 2 MIN READ

The European Union’s regulatory regime for artificial intelligence came fully into effect on August 2nd. The EU AI Act sets out a common set of rules that are intended to protect EU citizens from the harmful use of AI and regulate companies that use AI tools to make decisions which impinge on citizens’ rights in areas such as recruitment and financial services.

The European Commission has reserved supervisory and enforcement powers regarding the large general-purpose AI (GPAI) models which are deemed a systemic risk such as those underpinning ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot.

Member states have been given a free hand in terms of how to implement the Act via their domestic regulatory regime. Ireland has adopted a distributed regulatory model with 15 national competent authorities. This means that existing regulators such as the Data Protection Commissioner, the Central Bank and ComReg will be responsible for enforcing the Act.

The logic behind the approach is that these bodies have an existing regulatory relationship with relevant companies and organisations in areas such as GDPR and competition. The obvious flaw is the lack of a single point of contact, which the Government has rectified by the creation of a National AI Office, which came into being last week.

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Ireland’s regulatory approach is markedly different to other EU states, most particularly Germany and Spain, which have created a new single regulator for AI. Other states have spread the role over a number of regulators but few have spread the burden as wide as Ireland.

The importance of large technology companies to the Irish economy does leave the Government exposed to the accusation that its AI regulatory regime is decidedly light touch. Similar claims have been made about the data protection regime.

The Government clearly has tried to balance its EU obligations and public concern over AI with the need to maintain Ireland’s position as an attractive location for US technology companies. The strengths and weaknesses of its chosen approach will become apparent in time.