The Confiance.ai program brings together 13 leading industrial and academic founding partners (Air Liquide, Airbus, Atos, CEA, Inria, Naval Group, Renault, Safran, IRT Saint Exupery, Sopra Steria, IRT SystemX, Thales and Valeo) and, more broadly, an ecosystem of nearly 50 partners including startups and SMEs, and a German consortium of 10 industrial, academic and civil society partners (including Bosch, Siemens, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Sap, Itas/Kit, iRights.Lab, Ferdinand-Steinbeis-Institut, Basf, Tüv-Süd, Izew Universität Tübingen) led by VDE, one of Europe's leading technology organizations based in Germany, announce a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC).
This close alliance between key players in France and Germany, representing a significant number of strategic industrial sectors for Europe, aims to support the future European regulation on artificial intelligence (AI Act), by creating during 2023 a label joint Franco-German project on trusted and responsible AI which will be closely linked to future harmonized standards. Its ambition is to provide guidelines and specifications for AI applications, and to prepare ecosystems for compliance with the AI Act.
In concrete terms, these players will offer common repository for trusted AI (characteristics required for reliability, evaluation framework and key performance indicators). This benchmark will be based on the pooling of previous work carried out by each party, and will address issues of ethics, responsibility and safety, and may also extend to AI-related environmental issues.
Together, they will aim to bring this label to a European scale, and will also propose a governance structure, future European industrial alliance on AIfor promotion and distribution.
" The Confiance.ai collective has been working with the German ecosystem for many months. The strength of this alliance between leading industrial and academic partners lies in our desire to promote a shared vision of trusted and responsible AI, and to create a dedicated label, initially at the Franco-German level, but which will be extended to the European level. ", explains Julien Chiaroni, Director of the Grand Défi IA at the General Secretariat for Investment.
" Consensus on the principles of responsible AI use - such as transparency, fairness, privacy, reliability and accountability - is fairly obvious. The challenge lies in the operational implementation of these principles. With our AI Trust Standard & Label, we have developed a practical approach from a German perspective, and we look forward not only to further developing it, but also to integrating it into French and, ultimately, European work. The potential for synergies is considerable, adds Sebastian Hallensleben, Head of Digital Transition and AI at VDE.