Italy is in the final stretch of implementing the European AI Act, and the national privacy authority, the Garante, has just issued two opinions on the legislative decrees that will decide who actually polices artificial intelligence in the country. The first comes with a favourable verdict and a string of conditions; the second draws hard lines around police use of biometrics. Together they read as a catalogue of everything the drafts left undecided, and that catalogue is far more instructive than the approval itself.
The first decree designs the national governance and surveillance system for AI. It designates the Garante as market surveillance authority for high-risk AI systems in the areas where fundamental rights are most exposed: justice, law enforcement, migration, border management and democratic processes. On paper, this is exactly where you want a data protection authority standing guard. In practice, read what the Garante had to ask for and you start to see the cracks.
It had to ask for the power to adopt guidelines, recommendations and best practices alongside the other competent AI authorities. It had to ask for clarity on how its sanctions interact with the national privacy code. It had to ask to be involved in the regulatory sandboxes. And, most tellingly, it had to ask that the ban on fully automated decision-making be extended to decisions that significantly affect the employment relationship: performance evaluations, bonuses, career progression. Think about that for a second. In 2026, with the AI Act in force at European level, the Italian implementing decree did not, by itself, rule out letting an algorithm decide your promotion. An independent authority had to request it as a condition.
Then comes the money. The Garante asks, in plain bureaucratic language, for financial resources adequate to its new tasks. Translated from the institutional dialect: you have appointed us sheriff of high-risk AI across justice, borders and elections, now kindly fund the badge. This is the oldest trick in the Italian administrative playbook. Creating a watchdog costs one signature. Making it work costs a budget line. The signature always arrives; the budget line tends to get lost in the corridor.
The second opinion concerns the use of AI by police forces, and here the stakes stop being theoretical. The decree sets limits and safeguards for biometric data processing and remote biometric identification. The Garante opposed the automatic, generalised processing of biometric data of people entering public places or events. Facial recognition, in the Garante’s view, should happen only after the fact, on recordings that already exist, for specific operational needs. No preventive mass harvesting of faces at the stadium gate or the metro turnstile.
The authority also wants human oversight clarified, responsibilities in research projects defined, quality standards for biometric databases strengthened, and an explicit ban on databases built through indiscriminate scraping of the web or in violation of data protection law. The Garante is not willing to leave that point to anyone’s good taste, and it is hard to blame it: the precedent of companies hoovering billions of faces off the internet exists, it is recent, and nobody should have to discover after the fact whether public security found it inspiring.
The decree also promotes digital literacy and responsible AI education in schools, universities and professional training. Lovely. Nobody is against teaching kids about algorithms. But AI governance is not measured in awareness campaigns. It is measured by who can say no, with legal force and actual funding, to a system that scores your work performance or recognises your face in a crowd. Everything else is ceremony.
The real test starts now. Italy is about to find out whether its AI oversight is an institution or a press release. The conditions the Garante attached to its approval are the checklist: if they survive into the final decrees, with the money attached, the country will have something resembling supervision. If they get sanded down in the usual inter-ministerial negotiations, we will have appointed a sheriff, handed him a cardboard star, and called it compliance.
Raffaele Di Marzio
All my “insane” books on cybersecurity and governance are here 👇 https://cyberium.limited/bookshelf.html