AI Governance Engineer
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Loss of control

By Updated

One of the systemic risks the GPAI Code of Practice specifies: risks from humans losing the ability to reliably direct, modify or shut down a model, which may emerge from misalignment, self-replication, deception, resistance to goal modification or power-seeking 1. Signatories assess it for models with systemic risk; a deployer of agents asks how autonomy and tool use were evaluated.

Developed in
ch. 23, EU AI Act hooks for agents
ch. 08, GPAI Code of Practice
Chapters
ch. 08, Regulatory Map · ch. 23, AI Agents
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

2 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • GPAI Code of Practice

    The voluntary instrument (published 10 July 2025) that general-purpose-AI providers use to demonstrate compliance with their AI Act obligations until…

  • GPAI

    General-purpose AI model: under the AI Act, a model that shows significant generality, can competently perform a wide range of distinct tasks and can be…

  • Systemic risk

    Under the AI Act, the risk posed by the most capable general-purpose AI models, triggering extra evaluation, adversarial-testing and incident-reporting duties…

  • Autonomy

    In the EU AI Act and OECD texts, some degree of independence of action from human involvement, which almost every AI system has.

  • Deployer

    Under the EU AI Act, whoever uses an AI system under its own authority, other than in a purely personal, non-professional activity.

Sources

  1. [1] General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, Safety and Security chapter (Commitment 9, serious incident reporting, Measure 9.2; Appendix 1.4 specified systemic risks, incl. loss of control). European Commission. 2025-07-10. https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/118119 (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Loss of control. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/loss-of-control. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026lossofcontrol,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Loss of control}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/loss-of-control}
}