Google's lead EU privacy regulator opened an inquiry on Thursday into whether the search engine giant adequately protected European Union users' personal data before using it to help develop its foundational AI Model.

Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC), the lead EU regulator for most of the top US Internet firms due to the location of their EU operations in Ireland, said the probe concerned the Alphabet Inc unit's Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2).

"This statutory inquiry forms part of the wider efforts of the DPC, working in conjunction with its EU/EEA (European Economic Area) peer regulators, in regulating the processing of the personal data of EU/EEA data subjects in the development of AI models and systems," the DPC said in a statement.

Social media platform X agreed last week not to train its AI systems using the personal data collected from European Union users before they had the option to withdraw their consent following court action taken by the Irish regulator.

Meta Platforms paused its plans to use content posted by European users to train the latest version of its large language model after apparent pressure from the Irish regulators. The decision "followed intensive engagement" between the two, the watchdog said in June.

Italy's data privacy regulator last year temporarily banned ChatGPT because of data privacy breaches and demanded the chatbot's maker OpenAI meet a set of demands to resolve its concerns. (Agencies)