EU AI Act

The Auditors Are Coming: EU Moves to Certify Who Gets to Judge the Most Powerful AI Systems

The European Commission has opened a formal call for participants to help define the qualification requirements for external evaluators of General Purpose AI models with systemic risk. This is not a theoretical exercise. Under the EU AI Act, GPAI models above a certain capability threshold face mandatory third-party assessments, and right now, the rules for who is qualified to conduct those assessments don't fully exist yet. The Commission is essentially building the audit profession in real time, and whoever shapes those qualification standards will have enormous influence over which firms can credibly operate as evaluators and which AI developers face the most scrutiny. For businesses deploying or building on frontier AI models, this signals that a new compliance cost center is forming fast. Organizations that wait for the rulebook to be finalized before planning will find themselves scrambling. The smart move is to track this process closely now, because the evaluator qualification framework that emerges will directly determine how burdensome GPAI compliance becomes in practice.