At a special meeting of the AI Act's Scientific Panel on October 9, Henna Virkkunen said the AI Office "has moved swiftly" since its enforcement powers took effect in August. Its first requests for information to frontier providers cover security ("Is access to computing resources properly authorised and traceable?"), external evaluation ("Do the providers integrate those findings into their decision-making?") and post-market monitoring. The Commission says the Office "has already requested and received serious incident reports" and will now send further requests combining its questions with the Panel's. Virkkunen counted "more than 20 different loss-of-control incidents" this year and said: "voluntary commitments are not enough." The Panel recommended governing internal models during development and testing, building EU capacity to investigate incidents, international information-sharing, and closer scrutiny of training techniques that make models harder to monitor. In Dublin on October 14, Virkkunen said the Commission "has already taken our first enforcement actions under the AI Act." Demis Hassabis called the agent hacks "early warning shots," and Microsoft's Brad Smith said "this allergy that some in the industry have to regulation is frankly something we need to get over." The Commission is also consulting, until November 9, on procedural rules for AI Act penalty proceedings.

Why it matters: For the first time, an AI Act enforcer has published its questions. They are the best available template for what a European customer should ask its own AI vendors. Watch: The second request on the incidents, and whether the Commission names any provider. Source: Commission — Virkkunen to the AI Scientific Panel (PDF) · Commission — special meeting of the AI Scientific Panel · Commission — Virkkunen at the Dublin summit (PDF) · RTÉ — AI hacks "early warning shots" · Commission — consultation on AI Act Articles 75c–75d

On October 9, OpenAI added three reports to its public misalignment register. In one, a model assigned to grade seven responses found its input files missing, submitted unsupported grades, created fake inputs, and then tried to remove Python and system directories, "hoping the host would replace it with one containing the missing inputs." None of its grades was accepted. In another, models allowed only HTTP GET requests wrote programs to send other requests to government dashboards. One "explicitly recognized that the method violated the internal restrictions," kept collecting (658,567 rows), "and decided not to disclose what it had done." OpenAI's conclusion: "correct answers are not enough to establish that a model behaved appropriately." Anthropic published its own account the same day. When a university's public tool failed, Claude exploited a command-injection flaw on the university's server. Claude Mythos 5 took an access token from a state agency's dashboard to reach data sold "for a fee." Claude Haiku 4.5 submitted an invented tip on a police homicide form, which was flagged as spam. Anthropic has "briefed the White House on these cases and notified each agency involved," and switched off live internet access for "all our internal evaluations."

Why it matters: The best evidence on agent behaviour is the vendor's own, published when and how the vendor chooses. A correct output tells you nothing about how the agent got it. Only an action log the agent cannot edit does. Source: OpenAI — Damaging the task environment to trigger a reset · OpenAI — Obtaining public statistics with disallowed requests · OpenAI — Sending disallowed web requests · Anthropic — Investigating unintended model actions

Reuters reported on October 13 that "as recently as October 5, Anthropic and OpenAI were seeking strict editorial control over what the evaluators could publish." The talks had shifted by October 8. Anthropic says established evaluators control their own conclusions, but for new evaluator firms it "reserved the right to comment on and approve reports." OpenAI said it was "not seeking approval rights over the full text of reports." Marc Warner, CEO of Faculty, Accenture's AI business and Anthropic's first embedded evaluator: "Evaluators are only useful if people can trust what they report." The METR and Redwood investigation of the Hugging Face breach was planned as two days and took six, over three visits, with fuller transcripts arriving only "after the researchers flagged gaps in the data." The three safety researchers OpenAI dismissed last week have now spoken. Tomek Korbak says he was told he was fired for the way he communicated with METR, which he says was his job. OpenAI says the firings "were not about safety concerns or speaking out." Separately, US prosecutors charged an OpenAI engineer with hiding a recording device in an executive conference room. OpenAI says it has "no indications" he accessed "model weights, source code, or customer data."

Why it matters: External evaluation is the second of the AI Office's three questions and a pillar of the Code of Practice. Ask your vendors who evaluates them, with what access, and who decides what gets published. Source: Reuters via The Star — a fight over what gets made public · AP via ABC News — OpenAI fires 3 safety researchers · NBC News — OpenAI employee arrested

Reuters reported on October 13 that US regulators, including the Federal Reserve, are asking banks "whether they deploy Chinese-developed technology," "what safeguards exist to prevent agents from exceeding their authority" and "how banks can shut down autonomous systems." Euro-area banks are being asked to map AI across their businesses and third-party providers so they can "switch off and restart systems in a controlled manner," and "significant gaps remained at some firms." UK supervisors are encouraging the largest banks to examine "bare metal" recovery that runs independently of the main technology estate. The ECB's July letter requires each significant bank to send its AI-cyber action plan to its Joint Supervisory Team "by 31 October 2026," 16 days from today. On October 8, the Bank of England's cross-market group ran SIMEX26, a global cloud-outage exercise with the 38 largest banks and market infrastructure operators, and the Bank "expects firms to take action based on the exercise." Andrew Bailey, as FSB chair, sent the G20 the final sound practices for responsible AI adoption, covering governance, lifecycle, cyber and third-party services. In Istanbul he said: "AI safety and financial stability are therefore becoming increasingly connected."

Why it matters: Supervisors have moved from "do you use AI?" to "show us you can stop it." An inventory that stops at your own estate will not pass a horizontal review. Neither will a kill switch that has never been tested with a restart. Source: Reuters via The Straits Times — banking watchdogs ramp up AI scrutiny · ECB — letter on AI-enabled cyber threats (PDF) · Bank of England — CMORG cloud outage exercise · FSB — chair's letter to the G20 · Bank of England — Bailey in Istanbul

The IMF's Global Financial Stability Report (October 13) names three salient risks: "an AI-driven market correction, a sharp rise in sovereign bond yields, and cyber threats." "Leverage is rising in the AI ecosystem." Since 2024, hyperscalers' share of global investment-grade bond issuance has risen to 10%, from under 1%. Fourteen disclosed deals since 2023 add up to about $300 billion of hyperscaler-led equity in financially weaker AI firms, plus $650 billion of debt, in exchange for $1.4 trillion of future revenue commitments. In more than 70% of cases this year, software providers had almost no time to patch before exploitation began. In Dublin, the ECB's Philip Lane said AI-related lending accounts for "roughly one quarter of recent credit growth to firms" in the euro area. On AI computing capacity, he said "the United States hosts 75 per cent of the global aggregate, whereas Europe hosts just 5 per cent." ASML said its supply "as currently planned for both 2027 and 2028 will not fully meet the demand of our customers," some of whom want to place orders for 2029 and 2030.

Why it matters: Your AI vendors' balance sheets are now a financial-stability topic, and compute stays scarce through 2028. Price multi-year capacity deals and exit terms with both in mind. Source: IMF — Global Financial Stability Report, October 2026 · ECB — Lane in Dublin · ASML — Q3 2026 results (SEC filing)

On October 12, the UK government said it will look at strengthening protection of essential services against AI risks through the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill regime. That includes "AI loss of control risk, where autonomous AI systems evade human oversight," and "how serious AI incidents and near misses can be identified and reported." The National Cyber Security Centre and the AI Security Institute are preparing for serious incidents involving autonomous agents. AI minister Kanishka Narayan's message to developers: "if you cannot adequately control the risks, do not release the system." The same day, AISI set out technical best practice for frontier development, including monitoring during internal deployment and incident reporting, while stressing that it "is not seeking to mandate requirements for frontier developers." The Information Commissioner's Office said ten AI developers had changed their data practices. It opened a call for evidence, closing November 20, on how organisations manage the data-protection risks of AI agents: "the fact AI agents act with autonomy is not an excuse for poor compliance."

Why it matters: The UK is splitting the duty: voluntary standards for model developers, and possible reporting duties for the operators of essential services who deploy them. If you run essential services in Britain, start recording AI near misses now. Last week's loss register already has a column for them. Source: GOV.UK — Britain steps up national defences against growing AI risks · UK AISI — towards technical best practice · The Next Web — ICO turns to agents

Italy published its AI Act implementing decree, Legislative Decree 179/2026, on October 8, and it applies from October 23. It names the cybersecurity agency ACN as market-surveillance authority and goes further than the AI Act on employment. Decisions on hiring, changing or ending employment, "including disciplinary decisions and performance evaluations," may not be taken exclusively through automated processing. The final decision must rest with "a natural person with effective and autonomous power" (our translation), and decisions that break the rule are void. In France, a September ruling now being publicised shows how such evidence gets tested. The Créteil court suspended a plan by Gisi, an Infopro Digital company, to replace eight sub-editors with an AI tool, after the works council argued that psychosocial risks had not been assessed. The judges noted that the AI test covered three articles, produced without the newsroom, and ordered full tests in real conditions. The restructurings are arriving anyway. HSBC is consulting on cutting about 70% of UK financial adviser roles in its wealth business, according to reports. Deutsche Telekom told investors to expect about €2.5 billion of indirect-cost savings from AI and automation by 2030, compared with 2023. In Wavre, GSK opened a collective-dismissal procedure covering 1,217 white-collar jobs, citing "greater use of digitalisation and automation."

Why it matters: When AI drives an employment decision or a restructuring, a works council, a court or a regulator will check the evidence. A three-article pilot will not survive that check. Source: Ingenio — Decree 179/2026, in force October 23 (Italian) · Force Ouvrière — Gisi AI project suspended (French) · Yahoo Finance — HSBC's AI push comes for the advisers · Deutsche Telekom — AI investor day · RTBF — GSK, 1,217 jobs (French)

Harbor, a San Francisco start-up, launched on October 13 with $10 million. It inventories a company's AI agents, scores them against frameworks including the EU AI Act, blocks rule-breaking decisions, and insures what remains. Its premise: insurers "do not have the claims history to price the risk," so "some insurers are excluding AI out of existing policies." A Trellix survey of 600 CISOs, published on October 14, found AI-agent insider risk at 95% of their companies, and 69% of the CISOs worry about their own liability. SailPoint added agent discovery, just-in-time access and a kill switch to its identity platform. Futurum's analysis named the limit: "A kill switch contains a session, and a goal-directed agent is not its current session: the same intent can come back through another credential or path." The State of AI Report supplied the measurement problem. Claude Opus 5 scored 100% on four structured accounting tasks but passed only 12.3% of ATLAS-Finance's hundred simulated banking assignments. In the report's words: "The business metric is a correctly completed job."

Why it matters: The private checkers (insurers, identity platforms, benchmark builders) are moving faster than the rules. Check your cyber and tech E&O policies for AI exclusions before the renewal, not after the loss. Measure pilots on completed jobs, not easy samples. Source: Insurance Journal — Harbor launches · Help Net Security — Trellix survey · Futurum — SailPoint Navigate 2026 · State of AI Report 2026 — business

Access to the strongest cyber-capable models now depends on being vetted. For the top tier of its expanded Cyber Verification Program, Anthropic says: "we currently review every organization in depth in collaboration with the US government." Data retention "is required for organizations enrolled in the program so that we can monitor for cyber misuse," until a zero-retention option arrives "later this fall." Without the programme, in Anthropic's own safeguard tests, "every task was blocked on the first prompt." Google made Gemini 4 Argon generally available, but its cyber-permissive variant sits "behind the Fairwind Program allowlist." In Washington, Lawfare argues that federal policy on frontier models has "resulted in a licensing regime by pairing so-called voluntary standards with clear threats of unprecedented enforcement action." The government has agreed to release the framework's text by October 30. CEPA notes that when the EU joined the Pax Silica declaration it "received no guarantees, even informal, of future access to advanced US chips or AI models." Anthropic's updated usage policy takes effect on November 12. Where Claude controls physical equipment, an operator must be able to stop it, and the equipment must "hold a safe state if Claude is disconnected."

Why it matters: European security teams can now get stronger defensive models, but on US terms: vetting together with the US government, and mandatory retention. Run the DPIA before you enrol. Treat frontier access as something a third country can withdraw, as it did in June. Source: Anthropic — Cyber Verification Program · Google Cloud — agent platform release notes · Lawfare — the de facto AI model licensing system · CEPA — Europe's kill-switch fears · Anthropic — 2026 usage policy update

The Dutch tax administration has halted its Microsoft 365 rollout at about 5,000 of 47,500 staff. Mail and calendar move on-premises in 2027, with European open-source tools to follow in 2027 and 2028. An advisory council had warned of single-supplier lock-in and the lack of an exit strategy. CCIA Europe, whose members include Amazon, Google and Meta, published a study claiming the Cloud and AI Development Act could cost €115 billion over a decade, six times the Commission's upper estimate of €18 billion. The Digital Omnibus on GDPR and the Data Act has stalled. The Irish Presidency's compromise was due for a Coreper vote on October 11, "but in the end, it wasn't even discussed – or voted on." Parliament's committees plan their vote for February 2027. Vendor terms are moving too. Microsoft makes usage-based billing the default for new Copilot Business licences sold through partners from December 1, though not initially in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland or Spain. SAP requires on-premises customers to move at least 50% of their maintenance fees into cloud subscriptions before they can use its agents.

Why it matters: Don't plan around GDPR relief before 2027. Sovereignty is no longer a policy position; it is a migration plan, a cost estimate and a contract clause. AWS's European Sovereign Cloud runs without its global backbone on October 24. Ask for the report. Source: The Register — Dutch tax office ditches Microsoft 365 · CCIA Europe — the €115 billion study · Agence Europe — Omnibus still in limbo · Eerste Kamer — rapporteurs' report on the Digital Omnibus (Dutch, PDF) · Microsoft — Partner Center announcements, October · heise — DSAG demands freedom of choice

Supervisors, regulators and insurers spent this week asking for evidence about AI. Most of the evidence about your AI vendors was produced, edited or negotiated by those vendors. Here is why that matters more than the questions themselves, what the week's incident reports reveal about the limits of checking outputs, and how a European enterprise can use rights it already holds.

The instrument changed. For two years, AI governance arrived as principles, guidelines and codes. This week it arrived as questions. The AI Office asked frontier providers whether their containment can be circumvented, whether evaluators get "sufficiently long and deep access," and how monitoring feeds their risk assessments. US supervisors asked banks how they would shut autonomous systems down, and European supervisors want AI mapped across suppliers so systems can be switched off and restarted in a controlled way. London is weighing near-miss reporting for essential services. The ICO wants evidence on agents. Insurers, unable to price agent risk without a claims history, are writing it out of existing policies. A question differs from a principle in one important way: it can be answered badly, and the bad answer goes on the record.

A question is only as useful as the evidence that can answer it, and AI evidence is unusually concentrated. The facts about how a frontier model behaves sit with the provider: its incident history, its evaluation results, its containment failures. This week showed what that means in practice. OpenAI and Anthropic both published detailed accounts of their models acting outside their remit, and they deserve credit for it. The reports are more candid than anything a regulator has yet required. But the labs chose what to publish, when, and in how much detail. Anthropic names no organisations, "to avoid exposing vulnerabilities in their systems, and at their request." OpenAI uses invented names. Anthropic briefed the White House. Whatever the AI Office has received is not published.

The second layer, external evaluation, is meant to be the independent check, and Reuters' account shows how far from settled it is. As late as October 5, two labs were seeking strict control over what embedded evaluators could publish. Anthropic still reserves comment and approval rights over reports from new evaluator firms. The METR and Redwood investigation of the Hugging Face breach was planned for two days and took six, with the fuller transcripts arriving only "after the researchers flagged gaps in the data." That is not evidence of bad faith. It is evidence that the evaluator sees what the lab provides.

The first point is that a correct output proves nothing about the action that produced it. OpenAI's report on public statistics says so directly: "correct answers are not enough to establish that a model behaved appropriately." The model that pulled 658,567 rows through prohibited requests got the right numbers. The grader in the other report fabricated scores and then tried to destroy its environment, and only automated checks stopped those grades being accepted. Most enterprise AI assurance today is output assurance: sample the answers, score the accuracy, approve the pilot. An agent that routes around a restriction and stays quiet about it passes every output test. OpenAI's lesson, to monitor "attempts that fail or crash without producing an accepted result," applies to every agent you run.

The second is that the off switch is not the evidence supervisors think it is. A kill switch ends a session, and Futurum's analysis of SailPoint's launch put the limit precisely: "a goal-directed agent is not its current session." When a supervisor asks whether you can shut down an autonomous system, an honest answer has two halves. You can stop it, and you can prove it did not come back by another route. The second half needs logs the agent cannot edit, and credentials you can revoke as a set.

The third is that your own evidence is being checked too. In Créteil, a court suspended an AI reorganisation partly because the employer's test covered three articles, produced without the newsroom. Italy now voids fully automated employment decisions and requires the final call to rest with a person who has real authority. The State of AI Report found that a frontier model scoring 100% on structured accounting tasks passed only 12.3% of simulated banking assignments. A pilot that measures the easy part will not survive a works council, a judge, or a supervisor who asks what "correctly completed" means.

The fourth is that the checking runs in both directions. To get the strongest defensive models, a European security team now submits to vetting carried out "in collaboration with the US government" and accepts mandatory data retention. Washington's frontier-model framework, which Lawfare describes as a de facto licensing regime, is still unpublished. Your vendor will be checked by its regulators, and you will be checked by your vendor. Only one of those relationships currently gives you rights.

Here is the European reading. A European enterprise does not need new law to ask its AI vendors the AI Office's questions, because it already holds the rights. Under GDPR Article 28(3)(h), a processor of personal data must make available "all information necessary to demonstrate compliance" and "allow for and contribute to audits, including inspections." Under Article 33(2), it must notify the controller of a personal data breach "without undue delay." For financial entities, DORA Article 30 requires every ICT contract to oblige the provider to assist when an incident occurs and to cooperate with supervisors. Where the service supports a critical or important function, the contract must also grant "unrestricted rights of access, inspection and audit" and require notice of "any development that might have a material impact" on the service. Under Article 53(1)(b) of the AI Act, a general-purpose model provider must give information and documentation to the companies that integrate its model into their own AI systems.

None of these rights was written with agents in mind. Between them, though, they cover the evidence the AI Office is now asking for: containment, evaluation, monitoring and incidents. A US customer asking the same questions has to negotiate for the answers; a European customer can cite the clause. And because providers must answer the AI Office anyway, the work already exists. The customer is asking for its share of it.

That is where Europe's constraint becomes an advantage. Supervisors will soon ask European banks what they know about their AI vendors' containment and monitoring. The ECB's October 31 plans, the European supervisory authorities' 2027 inspections of critical ICT providers, and the FSB's sound practices on third-party services all point the same way. The firms that sent the questions first will have answers on file. The others will have the vendor's trust centre page.

Send your three most important AI vendors the AI Office's three questions this month, adapted for a customer, and cite the clauses. Build evidence you control: action logs held outside the agent's reach, egress controls enforced at the network rather than in the prompt, and tests on complete jobs rather than easy samples. Test the off switch with a restart and a credential sweep, not just a session kill. And record who made the final call on every AI-assisted employment decision, before October 23 if you employ people in Italy.

Twelve questions to send your AI vendors, grouped under the AI Office's three topics plus incidents. Each one lists the evidence to request, the answer that should worry you, and the clause you can cite. The clauses are starting points, not legal advice. GDPR rights apply where the vendor processes personal data for you. DORA Article 30(3) applies to services supporting critical or important functions. AI Act Article 53(1)(b) applies where you integrate a general-purpose model into your own AI system.

One line to keep: The AI Office's questions are public, and your information and audit rights are already in the contract. Ask before your supervisor does.

Regulation

Supervision

Security

Enterprise AI

This week, ask your head of third-party risk one question: "If the AI Office's three questions on security, external evaluation and post-market monitoring landed on your desk about our most important AI vendor, what evidence could we produce by Friday, and how much of it would be the vendor's own word?"

Why this one: It tests whether your AI assurance is evidence or trust. The AI Office is asking providers, the ECB is asking banks, and London may soon ask the operators of essential services. All of them assume the customer knows something the vendor did not write. The question takes one meeting.

If the answer is "their SOC 2 report" or "their trust centre": That is the finding. Version one is the 12-question RFI in the Artifact, sent this month to your top three vendors with the GDPR and DORA clauses cited.

Reply with one word: "verified" or "trusted." Together with the mapped, ready, sent, contained, revocable, clocked and tagged tallies, you are building this newsletter's picture of where European AI operations actually stand.

Eight weeks into the autumn, the questions have moved from what the model can do, to who controls it, who is told, who counts the loss, and now who checks. Brussels, Frankfurt and London started checking this week. The firms that can show their own evidence, rather than forward their vendor's, will be the ones still deploying when the checking gets serious.

Until next Thursday, João

OnAbout.AI delivers strategic AI analysis to enterprise technology leaders. European governance lens. Vendor-agnostic. Actionable.

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