Google's AI model faces EU scrutiny from watchdog over privacy rules

European Union regulators said Thursday they're looking into one of Google's artificial intelligence models over concerns about its compliance with the bloc's strict data privacy rules.

Ireland's Data Protection Commission said it has opened an inquiry into Google's Pathways Language Model 2, also known as PaLM2. It's part of wider efforts, including by other national watchdogs across the 27-nation bloc, to scrutinize how AI systems handle personal data.

Google's European headquarters are based in Dublin, so the Irish watchdog acts as the company's lead regulator for the bloc's privacy rulebook, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

The commission said its inquiry is examining whether Google has assessed whether PaLM2's data processing would likely result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals" in the EU.

Large language models like PaLM2 are vast troves of data that act as building blocks for artificial intelligence systems. Google uses PaLM2 t