Artificial Intelligence and Unfair Competition – Unveiling an Underestimated Building Block of the AI Regulation Landscape

Abstract The article illustrates the underestimated role unfair competition law (UCL) can play as a building block of the regulatory landscape relating to artificial intelligence (AI). To this end, it examines to what extent overarching, prominent principles of AI regulation such as fairness, transparency, autonomy and innovation are reflected in paradigms of UCL, and on this basis evaluates how the latter can contribute to the realisation of the former. In this way, prominent problems raised by AI that are commonly discussed under different legal regimes are reconsidered from a UCL perspective, showing that this perspective may complement or even substitute traditional regulatory approaches. Finally, the article indicates how AI could inversely give an impulse to the doctrinal advancement of UCL as a still ambiguous and insufficiently understood body of law.