Ricardo Teixeira, founder of CompuWorks since 2002 and a specialist with approximately 30 years of career experience started at Microsoft, analyzes in an interview the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Regulation (AI Act), which was approved in August. The regulation creates a legal framework that classifies AI systems into four risk categories: unacceptable risk (prohibited systems such as social scoring), high risk (applications in sensitive areas such as health and education), limited risk (with transparency obligations such as deepfake identification), and minimal risk (common applications). Fines for non-compliance can reach 35 million euros or 7% of annual global turnover.
Teixeira acknowledges that the European Union has a tendency to over-regulate, which can hinder innovation, but argues that the AI Act creates trust and security for those who deposit data in Europe, especially in a context where data sovereignty is increasingly relevant when data is submitted to data centers under US legislation. The specialist cites the recent case of OpenAI, which was creating scoring systems and attacking other systems, as an example of how AI "gained a life of its own."
The interviewee warns that Portugal is very poorly prepared to manage the risks associated with AI, highlighting the low digital maturity of Portuguese companies, particularly among SMEs and family businesses that, according to him, are more concerned with paying bills than with technological security. Teixeira argues that it is necessary to implement rigorous controls, permanent monitoring, supplier policy management, and user training, but acknowledges that it is very difficult to explain these issues to SME managers.
Teixeira predicts that the world as we know it will be "brutally altered" within five years, and that we are already in a phase of "AI against AI," where protection and attack systems use artificial intelligence. Despite considering that the United States is still ahead in innovation, he believes that China is gaining ground quickly and alarmingly, suggesting that leadership may soon change.
