The Regulatory Framing
The EU AI Act, the US AI Executive Order, and emerging frameworks in Singapore and the UK share one thing: they assess AI systems by behavior, not by internal state.
Whether your model "understands" is philosophically interesting. Whether it produces outputs that mislead users under specific conditions is a compliance risk.
What Production Teams Need to Know
Risk categories are based on use-case, not model type. A language model running a medical triage feature is high-risk. The same model summarizing meeting notes is minimal-risk.
Audit trails are mandatory at certain thresholds. If your system makes decisions that affect access to services, you need logging, explainability hooks, and human override paths.
The Practical Checklist
- Map your use-case to the relevant risk tier
- Design human oversight into the architecture, not as a bolt-on
- Build logging before you ship, not after an incident