The European AI Office was created within the European Commission to support the implementation and enforcement of the EU AI Act. It was set up by a Commission Decision of 24 January 2024, which entered into force on 21 February 2024, and sits inside the Commission’s digital department, DG CONNECT. The office is the central EU body with responsibility for the most powerful general-purpose AI models.
Under the AI Act, the Commission has exclusive power to supervise and enforce the obligations on providers of general-purpose AI models, and it carries out that work through the AI Office. The office develops methodologies to evaluate the capabilities of general-purpose models and to classify those with systemic risk, draws up codes of practice that spell out how the law applies in cooperation with industry and experts, investigates possible breaches, and can request corrective action and support the application of sanctions.
Beyond enforcement, the AI Office is tasked with strengthening the development and uptake of trustworthy AI across the EU, supporting standardisation and regulatory sandboxes, providing the secretariat for the AI Board, and fostering international cooperation. It grew quickly, employing well over a hundred staff across technical, legal, policy, and economic roles.
Why business readers should care: the European AI Office is the regulator that decides how the AI Act’s rules on general-purpose models are interpreted and enforced, so its codes of practice and guidance directly shape what AI providers must do to sell into the EU.