Article 68: Access to the Pool of Experts by Member States
Article 68 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 allows Member States to call upon the scientific panel established under Article 67, or to request technical support from the pool of experts, for the purpose of enforcing the Regulation at national level. This ensures that national market surveillance authorities have access to AI-specific technical expertise when evaluating complex AI systems — without every Member State having to build duplicate technical capacity from scratch.
Who does this apply to?
- -Member States requesting expert support for national enforcement activities
- -The scientific panel (Article 67) providing technical advice upon request
- -Market surveillance authorities evaluating complex AI systems at national level
Scenarios
A national market surveillance authority in a smaller Member State needs to assess whether a high-risk AI system used in critical infrastructure meets the accuracy and robustness requirements of Articles 9 and 15. The authority lacks in-house deep-learning evaluation expertise.
A Member State's competent authority suspects that a GPAI model integrated into a nationally deployed AI system may present systemic risk, but its technical team cannot independently reproduce the evaluation benchmarks.
What Article 68 does (in plain terms)
Enforcing the AI Act requires deep technical knowledge — evaluating neural network architectures, auditing training data pipelines, benchmarking model performance, and assessing systemic risk. Not every national authority can maintain this expertise in-house.
Article 68 solves this by giving Member States a right to call on the pool of independent experts set up under Article 67. In practice:
- A national market surveillance authority (designated under Article 70) can request technical support when it needs to evaluate a complex AI system or GPAI model.
- The support can cover any aspect of the Regulation that requires specialised AI expertise — from high-risk system conformity assessments to GPAI systemic risk questions.
- This mechanism avoids fragmented and uneven enforcement: a provider cannot benefit from deploying in a Member State with fewer technical resources.
Read the full text on EUR-Lex Article 68.
How Article 68 connects to the rest of the Act
- Article 67 — Scientific panel: Article 68 builds on the expert panel established under Article 67 by extending access to it for national enforcement.
- Article 70 — National competent authorities: the authorities that may invoke Article 68 are those designated by each Member State under Article 70.
- Article 74 — Market surveillance: the expert support feeds into the market surveillance and control framework.
- Article 84 — Right to an explanation: national authorities may need expert input to assess whether deployers comply with downstream obligations.
- Article 113 — Application dates: governance provisions apply on the staged timeline set out in Article 113.
Practical implications
For Member States and national authorities:
- Build the request pathway early: identify which unit in your authority will coordinate expert requests under Article 68, and establish internal procedures before enforcement cases arise.
- Coordinate with the AI Office: the AI Office facilitates the panel's work — ensure your authority has a working relationship with the Office before you need to invoke Article 68 urgently.
- Complement, don't replace: Article 68 provides supplementary expertise, not a substitute for building baseline AI literacy in your authority. Invest in training alongside the expert access mechanism.
For providers and deployers:
- Be aware that any national authority can access Union-level technical expertise. Do not assume that smaller or less technically resourced Member States will have weaker enforcement capacity.
- Maintain thorough technical documentation (Article 11) — it may be reviewed by external experts under this mechanism.
Compliance checklist
- National authorities: establish internal procedures for requesting expert support under Article 68 before enforcement cases arise.
- Identify the single point of contact (Article 70) responsible for coordinating expert requests with the AI Office.
- Providers: ensure technical documentation (Article 11) is sufficiently detailed to withstand expert review from the pool of independent experts.
- Track the scientific panel's published methodologies — they will inform how expert support is delivered at national level.
- Coordinate with the AI Office to understand the practical modalities for requesting and receiving expert assistance.
- Align enforcement readiness timelines with the staged application dates in Article 113.
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Frequently asked questions
Can any Member State request expert support, or only those with limited resources?
Any Member State can invoke Article 68. The provision is not limited to smaller or less-resourced Member States — it is designed to ensure consistent, high-quality enforcement across the entire Union regardless of each authority's in-house technical capacity.
Does the expert support under Article 68 cover only GPAI models?
No. While the scientific panel under Article 67 has a particular focus on GPAI models and systemic risk, Article 68 allows Member States to request expert support for enforcing the Regulation more broadly, including assessments of high-risk AI systems.
Can the scientific panel investigate GPAI models on its own initiative?
The scientific panel may provide qualified alerts to the AI Office when it has reason to suspect that a GPAI model poses a concrete, identifiable risk at Union level (Article 68(2)(a)). However, formal investigations remain the competence of the AI Office; the panel's role is advisory and technical.