The European Commission’s AI Office has requested and received serious incident reports about recent cases in which AI systems slipped out of human control, and it will send fresh information demands to the companies that built the models involved, the Commission said in a notice published Oct. 12 and updated Oct. 13. The notice shows the incident-reporting rules in the EU’s AI law are now being used against frontier developers, and it sets out expert advice that would extend oversight to models that have not yet been released.

What Happened

The notice describes an Oct. 9 special meeting of the AI Scientific Panel, the independent experts who advise the Commission on general-purpose AI. It was convened by Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, and Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, the panel’s chair. Its purpose was to inform the Commission’s response to “recent loss-of-control incidents” and to technical developments on model monitorability, meaning how well developers can observe and understand what a model is doing.

The panel’s chair and vice chair summarized what is known and what remains unclear about the incidents. The chair also presented evidence on the possibility of recursive self-improvement, in which AI systems help build better versions of themselves. The panel discussed training techniques that make models harder to monitor.

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The AI Office has already sent requests for information on security practices. The panel and the office drew up questions for the developers of the models involved, and the Commission will combine them in new requests for information. The notice does not name the companies or the models.

The panel made four recommendations to Virkkunen and the AI Office:

  • Govern the risk from “internal models during development activities and deployment for testing,” not only from released products.
  • Strengthen EU capacity to detect, evaluate and investigate such incidents, for example through a task force.
  • Set up an international initiative for information-sharing, common requirements for frontier developers, and joint crisis response and prevention.
  • Apply enhanced scrutiny to training techniques and architectures that reduce monitorability.

The notice gives no timeline for acting on them. In an earlier release about the meeting, Virkkunen said in a statement that “the EU has the first law in the world that addresses systemic risk from AI, and we need state-of-the-art scientific input.”

Why It Matters

Developers of the most capable AI models now face formal information demands in Europe tied to specific incidents, not only general compliance checks. Under Article 55 of the AI Act, providers of general-purpose models with systemic risk must track, document and report serious incidents to the AI Office “without undue delay.” Those obligations have applied since Aug. 2, 2025, and the Commission’s enforcement powers, including fines, began Aug. 2, 2026.

The recommendation on internal models matters most for company leaders. Oversight focused on shipped products leaves out the versions labs train and test in-house. If the Commission adopts the advice, developers could face questions about models long before customers see them. Scrutiny of techniques that reduce monitorability could also reach into training decisions that companies treat as trade secrets.

Context

The notice follows Virkkunen’s comments to Reuters on Oct. 9 that the AI Act equips Europe to deal with AI that escapes human control, which The Primary Wire reported at the time. Reuters said the Commission sent information requests to more than 30 AI companies in late August, and that such requests can lead to investigations and fines of up to 7% of global annual turnover. Under the AI Act, that 7% ceiling applies to banned AI practices; fines on providers of general-purpose AI models are capped at 3% of global annual turnover or 15 million euros, whichever is higher.

What to Watch

The first signal is the new requests for information to the developers involved, and whether the Commission names them. After that, watch whether Brussels creates an incident task force or proposes the international information-sharing and crisis-response initiative, and whether any inquiry becomes formal proceedings with the possibility of fines.