Azure Updates: EU AI Act; Storage; AI Models

Natasha Crampton, Microsoft’s Chief Responsible AI Officer looked at ways Microsoft is innovating in connection with the European Union’s AI Act. New obligations come into effect in 2025, prompting Microsoft to publish AI Act documentation on its Trust Center. In what it describes as its inaugural Transparency Report, the company took a risk management approach across the AI development lifecycle doing impact assessments and red-teaming to spot potential risks. Additionally, classifiers are a part of AI Content Safety. 

In anticipation of the Act taking effect in February, Crampton stated that Microsoft would continue to publish documentation, update its contracts, create new restricted uses, and carefully review its systems. 

Crampton wrote

One of the core concepts of the EU AI Act is that obligations need to be allocated across the AI supply chain. This means that an upstream regulated actor, like Microsoft in its capacity as a provider of AI tools, services, and components, must support downstream regulated actors, like our enterprise customers, when they integrate a Microsoft tool into a high-risk AI system. We embrace this concept of shared responsibility and aim to support our customers with their AI development and deployment activities by sharing our knowledge, providing documentation, and offering tooling. This all ladders up to the AI Customer Commitments that we made in June of last year to support our customers on their responsible AI journeys.

Microsoft VP Aung Oo looked at recent developments—and developments going forward—with Azure Storage. Storage has enabled model training for exabytes of data with support for inferencing and AI apps. According to Oo, Premium SSD v2 disks saw rapid uptake along with new integrations with Oracle and Epic. The Elastic SAN offering grew ten fold, while Container Storage offered more simplified ways to unify experiences for storage options.