The thirtieth additional provision of Law 22/2021, of December 28, on General State Budgets for the year 2022, authorizes the Government to promote a law for the creation of the Spanish Agency for Supervision of Artificial Intelligence (hereinafter, the Agency).

The creation of the Agency also complies with the provisions of the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan (PRTR), which establishes ten lever policies that give development to an agenda of investments and structural reforms aimed at achieving four transversal objectives: moving towards a greener Spain; more digital; more cohesive from a social and territorial point of view; and more egalitarian.

The sixth of these policies is the Pact for Science and Innovation, in which the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (Component 16, Reform 1, of the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan) is inserted. In order for the Agency to be able to contribute effectively to the fulfilment of the objectives set out in the PRTR, a prior designation of its headquarters is advisable and should be chosen with these objectives in mind.

Thus, in anticipation of the specific functions and objectives of the Agency, it has been considered necessary to determine the physical location, prior to its creation and, of course, prior to its implementation, in order to create an ecosystem and a pole of innovation and attraction of talent specialized in artificial intelligence or system supervision.

According to article 6.1 of Royal Decree 209/2022, “the Council of Ministers may agree on a reasoned basis to initiate the procedure prior to the creation of the entity”. In application of this forecast, the Council of Ministers, at its meeting held on September 13, 2022, agreed to initiate the procedure for the determination of the physical headquarters of the Spanish Agency for Supervision of Artificial Intelligence.

In addition, the Council of Ministers, at its meeting on September 27, 2022, agreed to carry out this procedure through the urgent procedure, in accordance with the provisions of Article 6.9 of Royal Decree 209/2022. The motivation for using the urgent procedure is that in the mandate contemplated in Law 22/2021, of December 28, the Government is urged to promote the creation of the Agency throughout this year, as well as, the need for the locality chosen to house the physical headquarters of the future Agency to be able to advance in the necessary preparation and organization work, with the objective of ensuring its correct implementation once its creation is provided by law. In addition, the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing harmonised rules in the field of artificial intelligence and amending certain legislative acts of the Union provides that the Member States must select a “national supervisory authority”, which must assume obligations in the short term. In addition, the early creation of the Agency will contribute to the achievement of the objectives set out in the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan and therefore of the commitments made with the European Commission.

In the same way, and following the provisions of articles 3.2.b) and 6.2 of the aforementioned Royal Decree 209/2022, once the Council of Ministers agreed on the Agreement of Initiation of Procedure for the Establishment of the Physical Headquarters of the Spanish Agency for Supervision of Artificial Intelligence, at its meeting held on September 13, 2022, the Advisory Commission for the Determination of the Headquarters of Entities belonging to the State Institutional Public Sector adopted, at its meeting of September 29, 2022, the report with the list of criteria that will be taken into account to determine the location.