France greenlights AI tools for Olympics despite ‘dystopian surveillance state’ concerns

The French National Assembly passed on Thursday a law allowing the government to use novel artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to monitor the public using video surveillance during the Olympic Games in Paris next summer.

The Paris Games are set to be an experiment in the use of video surveillance AI technologies, although the real-time system will not use facial recognition to identify and track specific individuals.

Instead the footage captured by cameras throughout the city will be analyzed by computer vision algorithms to detect suspicious items and activities such as unusual movements by crowds or abandoned bags, the French government said.

It argues that the system is needed to protect potentially millions of tourists visiting the city for the Games, with government representatives arguing that a similar system could have prevented the 2016 terror attack in Nice.

But a range of NGOs have decried the National Assembly’s decision as undermining European Union efforts to regulate AI.

Mher Hakobyan, who advises Amnesty International on AI regulation, said: “This decision, which legalizes the use of AI-powered surveillance for the first time in France and the EU, risks permanently transforming France into a dystopian surveillance state, and allowing large-scale violations of human rights elsewhere in the bloc.”

As drafted, the bill authorizes the use of the technology beyond the end of the Olympic Games — running through to the end of 2024 so it also captures the Rugby World Cup.

The program had initially been pitched to run until June 2025, before lawmakers earlier this month voted to restrict it so that it ended on December 24.

Hakobyan argued that legalizing the technology during the Olympics “undermines the EU’s ongoing efforts to regulate AI and protect fundamental rights through the AI Act.”

He added that France, as an influential EU member state, was “setting a worrying precedent at a time when the bloc should be focusing on cementing rights protections in the AI Act.”

The Amnesty representative also called for the European Parliament to “urgently take a strong position on banning mass surveillance technologies, including remote biometric identification and categorization in public spaces.”

The French government has denied that the system will use any biometrics, such as automated facial recognition technology.