The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Council on Wednesday, 8 November, 2023 adopted the new definition of Artificial Intelligence set to be incorporated in the EU’s new AI rulebook.

The OECD was initially established to manage the Marshall Plan, the American stimulus package to finance the reconstruction of Europe devastated by the Second World War.

Since then, the organisation has remained an international forum for economic collaboration with 38 member countries and is often regarded as a rich countries’ club. In this context, the OECD proposed in 2019 an influential set of principles for trustworthy AI policies, which included an early definition of Artificial Intelligence.

With Wednesday’s decision, that definition has officially been updated, and it is likely to be incorporated into the EU’s upcoming AI regulation. The definition is critical to the forthcoming law since it defines its very scope.

“An AI system is a machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that [can] influence physical or virtual environments. Different AI systems vary in autonomy and adaptiveness after deployment,” reads the new definition.

This definition was discussed mid-October in the OECD’s Committee on Digital Economy Policy and Working Party on Artificial Intelligence Governance. According to a presentation in this joint session, the timeline had been adapted “to inform the EU AI Act”.

As the new OECD’s definition of AI is now official, it is expected to be incorporated into the EU’s AI bill. However, EU policymakers received the revised definition in mid-October, and no internal text reflecting the change has been circulated.