GPAI (General-Purpose AI)
The EU AI Act's term for foundation models — an AI model trained on broad data that can be adapted to many downstream tasks. GPAI providers carry specific obligations under Articles 53-55: technical documentation, training-content summaries, copyright compliance, and (for GPAI with systemic risk) red-teaming + serious-incident reporting.
Related terms
- EU AI Act
European Union regulation (effective 2024, phased through 2027) that classifies AI systems into risk tiers — unacceptable (banned), high-risk (conformity assessment required), limited-risk (transparency obligations), and minimal — and imposes proportionate obligations. Applies extraterritorially to any provider placing AI on the EU market.
- Foundation Model
A large pre-trained model (LLM, vision, or multimodal) intended as a general-purpose substrate that downstream apps consume via prompting, fine-tuning, or agent scaffolding. Under the EU AI Act these are General-Purpose AI (GPAI) models and their providers carry specific obligations.
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Where this fits
GPAI (General-Purpose AI) is part of the Evaluation & Governance vocabulary used in the Generative AI Maturity Framework. See the full glossary for the complete set of 149 defined terms, or take the free maturity assessment to see where your organisation stands.