The Irish Data Protection Commission has opened an inquiry into whether Google complied with European Union privacy laws in the development of one of its artificial intelligence models.
The DPC said the cross-border statutory inquiry into Google concerns the question of whether it has complied with obligations that it may have had to undertake as part of a Data Protection Impact Assessment prior to engaging in the processing of the personal data of EU citizens associated with the development of its foundational AI Model, Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2).
"A Data Protection Impact Assessment, where required, is of crucial importance in ensuring that the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals are adequately considered and protected when processing of personal data is likely to result in a high risk," the DPC said in a statement.
The DPC said it is working with other regulators in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA).
"This statutory inquiry forms part of the wider efforts of the DPC, working in conjunction with its EU/EEA peer regulators, in regulating the processing of the personal data of EU/EEA data subjects in the development of AI models and systems," it added.
"We take seriously our obligations under the GDPR and will work constructively with the DPC to answer their questions," Google said in a statement today.
Earlier this month, a High Court dispute between X, formerly Twitter, and the DPC over the use of personal data to train AI systems was resolved.
The dispute centred around the DPC's concerns about the processing of personal data of millions of X's European users and the alleged use of that information to train any of X's AI systems.
The matter was resolved after X gave a permanent undertaking to the court that data from EU/EEA users posted on the X platform which was to be used for developing, refining and training the search service of the platform, known as 'Grok' between 7 May 2024 and 1 August 2024, the period when the relevant data is alleged to have been processed, shall be deleted and not processed.
In June, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced that it was pausing plans to use personal data to train AI models after concerns were raised by the DPC.
Privacy campaigners had complained about Meta's plans amid fears that they may be in breach of EU privacy rules.
The company said it was disappointed by the request from the DPC to delay the training of its large language models using public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram.
In July, Meta said it would withhold the roll out of future multimodal AI models in the EU over what it described as the "unpredictable nature" of the European regulatory environment.
Multimodal AI models are capable of processing data across video, audio, images and text on a variety of devices.
