The AI system Definition under the AI Act, a New Nomen Rosae?

This short paper aims to establish how to apply the ’AI system’ definition provided in the AI Act’s Article 3(1) and further clarified in the dedicated European Commission’s Guidelines in practice. Thanks to an interdisciplinary collaboration between legal scholars and bioengineers, we identify alignments and discrepancies between the legal definitions and the actual use of the same terms in the engineering community. We hence define a commented comparative interdisciplinary thesaurus of key terms. We further discuss the implications that terminological and interpretative issues may have on legal certainty and the compliance activities of developers of AI systems.