The compute compact is law. Now comes the audit.

After an eleven-hour final session in Strasbourg, EU negotiators fixed binding audit thresholds for frontier training runs — and handed the labs an eighteen-month compliance clock. The compact passed 374 to 188, with the full audit annex published alongside the vote.

The thresholds themselves were the least contested part of the text by the end. What took eleven hours was who signs the audit: an EU-only panel, as the Commission wanted, or a mixed panel with lab-nominated technical assessors, as three member states insisted on until the final hour.

What the audit actually requires

Every frontier training run above the compute threshold now needs a pre-registration filing, a running compute log, and a post-training system card reviewed by the panel before public release. The eighteen-month clock starts today — labs already mid-run get a compliance grace window, but nothing that starts fresh after this vote does.

"This is not a research restriction. It is a paper trail requirement, and every serious lab already keeps one." — a Commission technical advisor, speaking on background

The audit annex itself runs to ninety pages, and most of it is definitional: what counts as a frontier run, how compute is measured across mixed hardware, and how the panel treats runs that span multiple jurisdictions. GLOBAI will publish a line-by-line explainer of the annex this week.

What happens next

The panel's first seats are named by September. Its first pre-registration filings are expected within weeks — several labs confirmed to GLOBAI they had draft filings ready before the vote closed. The real test, panel members say privately, is whether the review timeline holds once filings start arriving in volume.