What Is General-Purpose AI (GPAI)?
General-Purpose AI (GPAI) is an AI model trained on large amounts of data that exhibits significant generality and can perform a wide range of distinct tasks, including tasks it was not explicitly trained for.
General-Purpose AI (GPAI) — an AI model trained on large amounts of data that exhibits significant generality and can perform a wide range of distinct tasks, including tasks it was not explicitly trained for.
The EU AI Act introduced GPAI as a distinct regulatory category covering foundation models (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, Llama, etc.). All GPAI model providers must comply with basic obligations — transparency, technical documentation, a policy for copyright-compliant training data. Providers of GPAI models that pose "systemic risk" (measured by compute threshold: >10²⁵ FLOPs) face additional obligations including adversarial testing, incident reporting, and cybersecurity measures. The systemic-risk category was the most contested provision during negotiations.
Source: EU AI Act, Articles 51–56
Plain-language explanation
The EU AI Act introduced GPAI as a distinct regulatory category covering foundation models (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, Llama, etc.). All GPAI model providers must comply with basic obligations — transparency, technical documentation, a policy for copyright-compliant training data. Providers of GPAI models that pose "systemic risk" (measured by compute threshold: >10²⁵ FLOPs) face additional obligations including adversarial testing, incident reporting, and cybersecurity measures. The systemic-risk category was the most contested provision during negotiations.
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