Brando Benifei

Brando Benifei (born 1986), a Socialists & Democrats MEP from La Spezia first elected in 2014 as one of the European Parliament’s youngest members, served as co-rapporteur of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act alongside Dragoș Tudorache — making the Italian left-winger one of the two legislators most responsible for the world’s first comprehensive AI law.

Holding the line in the trilogue

Benifei was the Parliament’s hard edge in negotiations: when France and Germany pushed to exempt foundation models to shield their national champions, he insisted general-purpose systems carry transparency and systemic-risk obligations, and he championed the Act’s outright bans — on social scoring, emotion recognition in schools and workplaces, predictive policing, and untargeted scraping of facial images. After the 36-hour final negotiation in December 2023 he declared the effort “worth it.” When MEPs adopted the law on March 13, 2024, he framed it as proof that human beings and European values sit at the centre of AI’s development.

He has since pressed for the unfinished business: an EU directive on AI in the workplace with stronger obligations toward workers, and vigorous enforcement as Big Tech lobbies to soften the Act’s implementation. Critics on the industry side blame his foundation-model provisions for burdening European startups; Benifei counters that trust is what will make citizens accept AI at all.