The AI-driven public actor: new challenges to fundamental rights and the role of the private sector

In the last few years, with the increasing use of technology, and especially of Artificial Intelligence (AI), new aspects in the exercise of the public actor’s power can be observed. Specifically, as AI technologies begin to play a dominant role in the contemporary exercise of power, it becomes increasingly important to examine the phenomenology of a new kind of power and its unique challenges to constitutional principles. On this merit, the public actor is making extensive use of technological and automated tools to reach fast and more efficient decisions. Considering that it has the privilege to acquire, ex lege, both ex officio or on the initiative of citizens, a wide availability of personal data and information, the development of AI technologies for public decision-making processes is now inevitable. Therefore, the rise of a new paradigm can be observed, the so called ‘AI-driven public actor’, which has elements of absolute novelty. In this context, this work has the aim of answering two major questions. First, which is the impact of the new paradigm of the ‘AI-driven public actor’ on the exercise of the citizens’ fundamental rights, considering the guarantees that the European Union (EU) legal order is currently trying to ensure. Second, the thesis investigates whether the EU legal order provides for specific provisions to balance the role of the private actor in public decisions. Accordingly, the answers to these questions have important implications not only in terms of understanding the future of the application of fundamental rights, but also of the maintenance of democratic institutions, as it may depends on the ways in which new technologies are changing the relationship between the public actor, the private one and the civil society.