Practical requirements extracted from policy instruments, with the source article, the actors they bind, evidence examples and original framework mappings. Legal requirements are marked; everything else is voluntary guidance.
California SB 53 · Business and Professions Code, Chapter 25.1 (as added by SB 53)
Large frontier developers must publish and maintain a framework describing how they incorporate national and international standards, assess catastrophic risk, apply mitigations, secure model weights, and govern internal processes, and must review it at least annually.
Source-linked (a factual check against the official source, not a legal review)Applies from 1 Jan 2026
California SB 53 · Business and Professions Code Section 22757.12 (as added by SB 53)
A large frontier developer must transmit to the California Office of Emergency Services, on the periodic schedule the statute sets, a summary of any assessment of catastrophic risk that results from the internal use of its frontier models. This covers risks arising before public deployment, such as during internal evaluation or use of the model to accelerate research, and complements the public transparency report.
Verified (a factual check against the official source, not a legal review)Applies from 1 Jan 2026
Legal requirementSafety testing and evaluation·European Union
A general-purpose model is presumed to have systemic risk when the cumulative compute used for training exceeds 10^25 floating-point operations, or when the Commission designates it. Providers must notify the Commission, perform model evaluations including adversarial testing, assess and mitigate systemic risks, track and report serious incidents, and ensure adequate cybersecurity for the model and infrastructure.
Pending review (a factual check against the official source, not a legal review)Applies from 2 Aug 2025
Legal requirementSafety testing and evaluation·South Korea
An AI business operator whose AI system's cumulative training computation exceeds the threshold set by Presidential Decree must identify, assess and mitigate risks across the system's life cycle, build a risk management system to monitor and respond to safety incidents caused by the AI, and submit the results of these measures to the Minister of Science and ICT. The threshold and reporting form are set in the Decree.
Verified (a factual check against the official source, not a legal review)Applies from 22 Jan 2026
Voluntary guidanceSafety testing and evaluation·United States
Measure covers selecting metrics and test methods, evaluating validity, safety, security, resilience, explainability, privacy, fairness and bias, and monitoring these over time, including through independent review and red-teaming for generative AI.
Source-linked (a factual check against the official source, not a legal review)
A single practical requirement pulled out of an instrument and stated on its own: keep a risk management system, log incidents, document training data, provide human oversight, and so on. Each one cites the article or section it comes from so you can check it against the source.
Does a voluntary obligation have legal force?
No, and every obligation is labelled either a legal requirement or voluntary guidance. Voluntary items still matter in practice, because procurement questionnaires and auditors ask about them, but only the binding ones carry legal consequence.
How do I find the obligations that apply to my organisation?
Filter by jurisdiction, category, actor, sector or use case. The applicability check asks a short set of questions and returns the duties that may reach you. It is an educational screen, not a legal determination, and it says so.
Why do some instruments have no obligations listed?
Because nobody has broken them out yet. Most instruments are recorded at summary level first; obligations are added jurisdiction by jurisdiction. The coverage and open-gaps pages publish exactly what is missing rather than hiding it.
