Council reaches position on Chat Control (www.consilium.europa.eu)

The EU Council has agreed a negotiating position on a new regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse online. The measure would impose obligations on digital service providers to assess and mitigate the risk their services pose for disseminating child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or soliciting children, require removal/blocking and delisting powers for national authorities, and create an EU Centre on Child Sexual Abuse to run a reports database, share indicators with law enforcement, and support victims. Services will be classified into high/medium/low risk by objective criteria; high‑risk providers can be obliged to contribute to development of mitigation technologies. The Council also proposes to make permanent an existing temporary exemption that allows voluntary scanning by certain communications providers. For the AI/ML community this is consequential: it will increase demand for scalable detection, triage and privacy‑preserving CSAM‑indicator technologies (hashing, embeddings, image/video classifiers, metadata signals) as part of mandatory risk assessments and mitigation pipelines. The EU Centre’s indicators database and required reporting will create standardized signals but also raises data governance, provenance, privacy and labeling‑quality issues. Product architecture may be affected (server‑side vs client‑side detection, implications for end‑to‑end encryption), and firms should expect regulatory scrutiny, auditability and possible penalties for non‑compliance. Researchers and engineers will face stronger incentives — and legal/ethical constraints — to develop robust, transparent, and privacy‑respecting detection systems.