intended to plug the practice gap

The Commission has been working with industry on a stop-gap AI Pact for some months — and it confirmed today this is intended to plug the practice gap until the AI Act comes into force.

While foundational models/GPAIs that have been commercialized face regulation under the Act, R&D is not intended to be in scope of the law — and fully open sourced models will have lighter regulatory requirements than closed source, per today’s pronouncements.

The package agreed also promotes regulatory sandboxes and real-world-testing being established by national authorities to support startups and SMEs to develop and train AIs before placement on the market.