Systemic Risk

A level of risk arising from an AI model or family of models whose scale, deployment or capabilities could cause broad, cross-sectoral harms to fundamental rights, public safety, democratic processes or critical infrastructure; the Regulation provides criteria and procedures to identify systemic-risk models (notably among general-purpose AI) to trigger enhanced obligations and Commission powers.

Risks that can cascade across sectors or national infrastructure, producing wide-ranging impacts beyond a single domain and potentially necessitating whole-of-government responses and cross-sector mitigation strategies.

Applies to GPAI models that are highly capable or widely used and could potentially lead to significant, widespread negative consequences. The AI Act uses criteria such as the cumulative amount of computing power used to train a model (e.g., exceeding 10^25 FLOPs) to identify models presumed to have high-impact capabilities.