GPAI (General-Purpose AI)
The EU AI Act category covering general-purpose AI models (foundation LLMs) — Article 53 sets baseline obligations on every provider, Article 55 adds systemic-risk obligations above a 10^25 FLOP training-compute threshold.
What GPAI (General-Purpose AI) means in practice
GPAI — General-Purpose AI — is the EU AI Act category for foundation models trained on broad data and capable of being adapted to many downstream tasks. Article 53 sets baseline obligations on every GPAI model provider: technical documentation, training-data summaries, copyright compliance, transparency to downstream deployers. Article 55 adds the systemic-risk regime above a 10^25 FLOP training-compute threshold: model evaluations, adversarial testing, incident reporting, cybersecurity for the model artefact itself. Most enterprise customers are not GPAI providers; they're integrators of GPAI models into downstream products. The downstream integration is what Article 25 catches — and the sovereign-deployment advantage is that customer-controlled fine-tunes and customer-owned model artefacts produce a cleaner Article 25 + Article 53 evidence story than vendor-mediated equivalents.
Related terms
EU AI Act →
The European Union's AI Act — risk-tiered regulation of AI systems, with high-risk-system requirements that effectively mandate auditability, human oversight and conformity assessment.
Article 25 (Provider vs Deployer) →
The EU AI Act provision that converts a deployer of an AI system into a provider — and therefore subject to the full Articles 9–15 stack — when they make substantial modifications, rebrand, or change the intended purpose.
Large Language Model (LLM) →
A transformer-architecture neural network trained on very large text corpora to predict the next token in a sequence, producing fluent natural-language output across a wide range of tasks.
More in this category
The EU AI Act for Enterprise.
What the EU AI Act actually requires — and how to architect compliance.
- 01What the EU AI Act is. The world's first comprehensive horizontal AI regulation — risk-tiered, extraterritorial, in force since August 2024.
- 02What it is NOT. Five common misconceptions — and what the Act actually says.
- 03The four risk tiers. Prohibited · High-risk · Limited risk · Minimal — a practical map of where enterprise workloads land.
- 04The enforcement timeline. The dates that drive programme planning — including the 2 Dec 2027 Annex III deadline set by the July 2026 Digital Omnibus.
All 62 terms, in plain language
Sovereign AI, RAG, agentic AI, IDP, MLOps and the regulations that shape enterprise AI.