‘Inside’ the AI Act Negotiations: Three Transversal Narratives in the Struggle for Social Positioning and Identity‐Making

Abstract

This article adopts a political ethnographic approach to follow narrative practices enacted by diplomats and bureaucrats during the trilogue negotiations of the European Union's (EU) Artificial Intelligence Act where inter‐institutional dynamics were at stake. I argue that when diplomats and bureaucrats negotiate AI, they also negotiate their desired position in a struggle over status in EU's diplomatic structures while constructing competing identities of the EU. The narrative analysis shows that three narrative positions endure, ethical and moral; national and economic; supranational and global, which interact through negotiation practices of brokerage and improvisation (re)negotiating social positions and (re)constructing three faces of a European AI identity. These narratives are not performed by a specific diplomat or bureaucrat but remain transversal, competing within and across national, ideological and institutional boundaries. The competing meanings are comprised into the AI Act constituting AI, its governance structure and the EU with ambiguous meanings.