Germany, France, and Italy have reached a cooperative agreement on how to regulate artificial intelligence in the future, according to a joint paper Reuters is reporting on, which it is expected will facilitate further negotiations within the broader EU.

The three governments agreed that they would favor seeing binding voluntary commitments entered into by both large and small AI providers within the European Union.

Currently how the European Union should position itself from a regulatory perspective is being debated by the European Commission, the European Parliament and the EU Council.

In June, an “AI Act” was presented by the Parliament, which was designed to avoid discriminatory effects, but also avert safety risks from AI applications without slowing down innovation in Europe within the field of this powerful new technology.

The European Parliament proposed during the discussions that initially the code of conduct should only be binding for major AI providers which are mostly from the United States.

Three EU governments, however pointed out that while this might offer a competitive advantage to the smaller European providers, it could backfire, and lead to the market having less confidence in the security of the smaller providers, and therefore they would acquire fewer customers.

They maintained that for that reason, the rules which are developed for transparency and good conduct should be made universally binding for everyone.

The paper proposed that any such scheme should initially impose no sanctions.

However the paper noted that if there were to be violations of the code of conduct identified after a specific period of time, the EU could set up a system of sanctions. The paper proposed that a European Authority would monitor compliance with the standards in the future.

The Economy Ministry of Germany, which has jurisdiction over the topic with the Ministry of Digital Affairs, noted that it was their belief that laws and state control should not regulate AI itself but rather the applications of the technology.

They maintained that the development of AI models which are not in use yet, or which have no market applications, should not be regulated separately by the state.

In Jena, in the state of Thuringia, the government of Germany is hosting a digital summit on Monday and Tuesday where representatives from politics, business and science will feature the topic of artificial intelligence and its potential regulation within their discussions.

On Wednesday it is expected to be discussed when the German and Italian governments host a meeting in Berlin.