Top 10 operational impacts of the EU AI Act – Obligations for general-purpose AI models

This article is part of a series on the operational impacts of the EU AI Act.

If you were to read the European Commission's original AI Act proposal, published in April 2021, you would find it conspicuously devoid of references to general-purpose AI. With the benefit of hindsight, this might seem like a surprising omission. Yet, outside of the world of AI experts, few people had ever heard of general-purpose AI at the time the proposal was published.

Fast-forward to a little over one year later, OpenAI released ChatGPT to an unsuspecting public in November 2022, wowing them with its human-like, if sometimes unreliable, responses to their prompts. It quickly went viral, reportedly reaching 100 million users in just two months and becoming the fastest adopted consumer app of all time.

As a result, terms like large language models, generative AI and general-purpose AI began to enter the consciousness of European legislators, if not exactly the public consciousness. Clearly, the AI Act would need to regulate general-purpose AI, but how?

This was not an easy question to answer. The proposed law worked by placing AI systems into prohibited, high and low risk buckets to decide which rules to apply. However, by its very nature, general-purpose AI could be implemented across an unimaginably wide range of use cases that spanned the entire risk spectrum. The risks arising in any given scenario would necessarily depend on context, making it impossible to place general-purpose AI into a single risk bucket.

Consequently, Europe's legislators ultimately proposed an entirely new chapter of the AI Act dedicated specifically to regulating general-purpose AI models: Chapter V.

This article provides insight into obligations for general-purpose AI models in relation to the EU AI Act.