The AI Act tiers obligations by risk: banned social scoring and real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces (with exceptions), strict documentation for hiring and credit-scoring AI, and transparency rules for general-purpose models like GPTGenerative Pre-trained Transformer — OpenAI's family of large language models from GPT-1 through GPT-5.-4. TeamsMicrosoft Teams — chat, video calls, and Office integration for workplace collaboration. shipping copilots, hiring tools, and medical AI face conformity assessments — influencing how U.S. and UK regulators draft their own AI rules.

The EU AI Act is the first major horizontal law governing foundation modelA large pre-trained model adapted to many downstream tasks — GPT, Claude, and Llama are examples.s and high-risk AI.

It created complianceFollowing laws and industry rules — privacy, security, and financial regulations for software companies. categories that product and ML teams must map features against.