Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2025-12-26
Region: BE100
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 79419000
Estimated value: 7373017.5 EUR
Award criteria: quality, price
EU fund: eu-funds

Technical requirements: Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act), which has entered into force on the 1st of August 2024, and for which certain rules will become applicable on the 2nd of August 2025 establishes a comprehensive legal framework governing the area of Artificial Intelligence, and in particular relevance to this procurement, establishes responsibilities for providers of General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) models, aiming to ensure transparency, safety, and accountability in the deployment and use of AI technologies.

Articles 89 and 92 of the AI Act respectively allow the AI Office to monitor the compliance with regards to the AI Act and perform evaluations of GPAI models to assess the compliance and investigate systemic risks at Union level. Article 93 of the AI Act allows the Commission to request providers to take appropriate measures to comply with the obligations, to implement mitigation measures, or to restrict the availability of the model.

In order to carry out these enforcement tasks in relation the AI Act, the AI Office is seeking support of suitable third-party contractors to provide technical assistance aimed at supporting the monitoring of compliance, in particular in its assessment of risks posed by GPAI models at Union level.  

This tender has been split into six lots. Five of those lots dedicated to specific systemic risks, namely (i) CBRN risks, (ii) cyber offence risks, (iii) loss of control risks, (iv) harmful manipulation risks and (v) sociotechnical risks. These lots all share a similar tasks and services:
•	The organisation of multiple risk modelling workshops together with the AI Office, producing a risk model, risk scenarios, as well as corresponding thresholds, informing further work on evaluations. 
•	The development of newly evaluation tools that are private to the Commission.
•	The onboarding of existing evaluations that are publicly available into the developed risk framework. 
•	The creation of a reference procedure and reporting template for doing risk assessment with respect to the developed evaluations.
•	Ad hoc and on demand services for complex evaluations, including for example red-teaming and uplift studies.
•	A risk monitoring service in the form of regular briefings on new developments (e.g. models, risk sources, elicitation techniques, mitigation, incidents) to complement existing AI Office monitoring actions.
The scope of these tasks varies by lot.

Furthermore, there is one lot that is cross-cutting across various risk.
•	Lot 6: agentic evaluation interface, procuring software, Cloud infrastructure support, and methodology to evaluate GPAI on diverse types of benchmarks, focusing on agentic interaction and complex agentic benchmarks.
The objective of this lot is to support the AI Office in its enforcement of the AI Act in relation to General-Purpose AI Models (GPAI) and General-Purpose AI Models with systemic risk (GPAISR), specifically where such models may pose risks of enabling chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear attacks or accidents. This includes significantly lowering the barriers to entry for malicious actors, or increasing the potential impact achieved, in the design, development, acquisition, and use of such weapon. The AI Office seeks to improve its capacity in identifying, monitoring, and assessing these risks, including the capacity to measure relevant capabilities of GPAI models and assess the effectiveness of mitigations aimed at preventing malicious actors from gaining access to these capabilities.
This lot aims to allow for flexible and close collaboration in developing risk models, prioritising risk scenarios, setting risk levels including a level of unacceptable systemic risk at Union level, identifying key model capabilities that could be linked to risk levels, and tailoring both new and existing risk measurement instruments to the context of the AI Office. Flexible collaboration between the AI Office and the contractor will be needed to ensure robust risk assessment as risks and our understanding of them evolve.
The objective of this lot is to support the AI Office in its enforcement of the AI Act in relation to General-Purpose AI Models (GPAI) and General-Purpose AI Models with systemic risk (GPAISR), specifically where such models may pose risks related to offensive cyber capabilities that could enable large-scale or sophisticated cyber-attacks, including on critical systems (e.g. critical infrastructure). This includes automated vulnerability discovery, exploit generation, operational use, and attack scaling. The AI Office seeks to improve its capacity in identifying, monitoring, and assessing these risks, including the capacity to measure relevant capabilities of GPAI models and assess the effectiveness of mitigations aimed at preventing malicious actors from gaining access to these capabilities.
This lot aims to allow for flexible and close collaboration in developing risk models, prioritising risk scenarios, setting risk levels including a level of unacceptable systemic risk at Union level, identifying key model capabilities that could be linked to risk levels, and tailoring both new and existing risk measurement instruments to the context of the AI Office. Flexible collaboration between the AI Office and the contractor will be needed to ensure robust risk assessment as risks and our understanding of them evolve.
The objective of this lot is to support the AI Office in its enforcement of the AI Act in relation to General-Purpose AI Models (GPAI) and General-Purpose AI Models with systemic risk (GPAISR), specifically with regards to risks related to the inability to oversee and control autonomous GPAISRs that may result in large-scale safety or security threats. This includes model capabilities and propensities related to autonomy, alignment with human intent or values, self-reasoning, self-replication, self-improvement, evading human oversight, deception, or resistance to goal modification. It further includes model capabilities of conducting autonomous AI research and development that could lead to the unpredictable emergence of GPAISRs without adequate risk mitigations. 
The AI Office seeks to improve its capacity in identifying, monitoring, and assessing these risks, including the capacity to measure relevant capabilities and propensities of GPAI models and assess the effectiveness of mitigations.
This lot aims to allow for flexible and close collaboration in developing risk models, prioritising risk scenarios, setting risk levels including a level of unacceptable systemic risk at Union level, identifying key model capabilities that could be linked to risk levels, and tailoring both new and existing risk measurement instruments to the context of the AI Office. Flexible collaboration between the AI Office and the contractor will be needed to ensure robust risk assessment as risks and our understanding of them evolve.
The objective of this lot is to support the AI Office in its enforcement of the AI Act in relation to General-Purpose AI Models (GPAI) and General-Purpose AI Models with systemic risk (GPAISR), specifically where such models may pose risks of enabling the targeted distortion of the behaviour of persons, in particular through multi-turn interactions, that causes them to take a decision that they would not have otherwise taken, in a manner that causes, or is reasonably likely to cause, significant harm on a large scale. This includes the capability to manipulate through multi-turn interaction and the propensity of models to manipulate, including manipulation of high-stakes decision makers, large-scale fraud, or exploitation of people based on protected characteristics. As a guide, risk of harmful manipulation exists if it cannot, without reasonable doubt, be ruled out that a GPAISR, when integrated into an AI system, enables the AI system, irrespective of the intention of the AI system provider or deployer, to deploy subliminal, purposefully manipulative, or deceptive techniques as outlined in the Commission Guidelines on prohibited artificial intelligence practices established by Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (AI Act)  ( ).
The AI Office seeks to improve its capacity in identifying, monitoring, and assessing these risks, including the capacity to measure relevant capabilities of GPAI models and assess the effectiveness of mitigations aimed at preventing malicious actors from gaining access to these capabilities.
This lot aims to allow for flexible and close collaboration in developing risk models, prioritising risk scenarios, setting risk levels including a level of unacceptable systemic risk at Union level, identifying key model capabilities that could be linked to risk levels, and tailoring both new and existing risk measurement instruments to the context of the AI Office. Flexible collaboration between the AI Office and the contractor will be needed to ensure robust risk assessment as risks and our understanding of them evolve.


Award value: 7373017.5
Number of bids: 15