Glossary
What is General Purpose AI (GPAI)?
Last updated: 2026-05-26
Definition
General Purpose AI (GPAI) under the EU AI Act is an AI model that displays significant generality and can perform a wide range of distinct tasks — large language models like GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, and Mistral all qualify. GPAI providers carry specific obligations on technical documentation, training-data summaries, copyright compliance, and (above 10^25 FLOPs of training compute) systemic-risk controls.
Why General Purpose AI matters
GPAI obligations applied from 2 August 2025. Most European AI deployments use GPAI under the hood, so platform buyers need to know which provider obligations transfer to them as deployers (Article 25). The systemic-risk threshold (currently OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral) triggers additional adversarial evaluation, incident reporting, and cybersecurity duties.
How General Purpose AI works
- 1A model qualifies as GPAI if it can perform a wide range of distinct tasks — practical test: was it trained on broad web text and can it write code, summarise, classify, translate?
- 2The provider publishes technical documentation, a training-data summary, and a copyright-compliance policy. The Commission keeps a register of providers.
- 3If training compute exceeds 10^25 FLOPs, the model is presumed to carry "systemic risk" — provider must run adversarial evaluations, report serious incidents, and maintain cybersecurity controls.
- 4Deployers who fine-tune or modify GPAI may become providers themselves (Article 25) if their modification is significant enough.
- 5For risk-classification purposes, GPAI itself has no risk class — the deployment context (your specific use of it) is what gets classified high/limited/minimal.
Examples
- OpenAI publishes GPT-4o's model card + training-data summary + copyright policy and reports through the AI Office's GPAI portal.
- A European SaaS that fine-tunes Mistral on customer data does not automatically become a GPAI provider, but does become an AI system deployer with Article 25 obligations.
- A model with 10^25+ FLOPs (GPT-4 class and above) must run pre-deployment red-teaming on misuse risks and report any "serious incident" within 15 days.
References
Related concepts
AI agent
An AI agent is a software program that uses a large language model (LLM) to autonomously plan and complete a task, combining reasoning, tool use, and memory. Unlike a one-shot prompt, an agent can break a goal into steps, call external tools or APIs, and decide what to do next based on intermediate results.
Multi-LLM chat
Multi-LLM chat is a chat interface that lets you switch between multiple large language model vendors — OpenAI (GPT), Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), Mistral, and others — inside a single conversation thread. You pick the model best suited to the next turn instead of being locked into one vendor for the whole task.
Human-in-the-loop (HITL)
Human-in-the-loop (HITL) is a design pattern where a human reviewer must approve, edit, or veto an AI agent's output before it executes a consequential action. The agent pauses, surfaces what it is about to do, waits for the human, and then proceeds — a deliberate brake to keep autonomy bounded.
AI agent platform
An AI agent platform is software that lets organizations build, deploy, govern, and monitor AI agents at scale — typically with a workspace UI, multi-LLM access, knowledge bases, integrations, scheduling, and audit logging. The platform replaces the need for each team to assemble agent infrastructure from raw frameworks.
FAQ
General Purpose AI — common questions
- Is GPT-4o classified as GPAI with systemic risk?
- Yes. OpenAI's frontier models (GPT-4o and successors) are presumed to be GPAI with systemic risk under the 10^25 FLOP training-compute threshold, triggering the full Chapter V obligation set including adversarial evaluation and serious-incident reporting.
- Does using a GPAI model make my company a GPAI provider?
- No. Calling OpenAI's API does not make you a GPAI provider. You become a deployer of an AI system. The GPAI provider obligations stay with OpenAI. If you fine-tune or significantly modify a GPAI for re-distribution, Article 25 may pull you into provider duties.
- Where can I check whether a model has GPAI status?
- The European AI Office maintains a public register of GPAI providers and systemic-risk models. Most major providers also publish model cards that explicitly state GPAI status and training-compute estimates.