AI Governance

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission spent 5 years looking under the hood of AI systems before putting much of what it had seen into a single report. From 2021 through 2025, the regulator engaged with controllers over the creation, launch, and deployment of approximately 180 AI products and services. Behind that number sat thousands of pages of briefings, risk assessments, descriptions of technical and organizational measures, and compliance documentation. The work stretched from large language models and recommender systems to facial recognition, age assurance, personalization, and AI agents.

Nearly every senior AI executive surveyed by EY says their organization has formal rules governing artificial intelligence. Nearly half say those rules have been bypassed when a deployment was urgent. That runs through EY's new AI Risk and Governance Survey, which found that large US companies are rapidly putting AI and autonomous agents to work while struggling to keep their governance processes aligned with the technology.

A study released Tuesday by France’s data protection authority, the CNIL, alongside the French Ministry of Labour and Solidarity and the French Association of Data Protection Officers (AFCDP), found that 55% of DPOs already consider the EU AI Act part of their responsibilities. Seventy-one percent would like their role formally extended to include compliance with the regulation.

New York will begin directing large frontier AI developers to register with the state in November, giving companies roughly two months to prepare before the central requirements of the state's RAISE Act take effect in January.

Denmark has returned to a difficult question in its plans for public-sector AI, sending a revised bill for consultation that would give public authorities a general legal basis to process personal data when developing and using AI systems.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a question that had followed me from a computer room in Milwaukee thirty years ago into today's conversations about agentic AI, "Where is the big red button?"

HelmGuard has raised $7.3 million in seed funding to expand its AI-driven approach to governance, risk and compliance, as the company looks to replace some of the questionnaires and periodic document reviews that still underpin corporate risk assurance with agents capable of examining evidence directly.