The Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment (FRIA) under the EU AI Act is meant to protect fundamental rights from AI harms, but its practical rollout raises hard questions. This article unpacks FRIA’s core components and its relationship to the GDPR’s Data Protection Impact Assessment, showing how FRIA’s focus on “interferences” — rather than just quantifiable “damages” — gives it a far broader reach, including cases with no personal data at all.

One year after “AI’s Sputnik moment,” the global regulatory response to DeepSeek has produced a starkly bifurcated outcome: constrained in the West, yet surging 960% worldwide. This comprehensive study documents the regulatory storm, unpacks the legal concerns, and confronts an uncomfortable truth about the limits of extraterritorial enforcement.