v2026.1CASRAI Dictionary 1,610 entries across 24 domains · CC-BY 4.01,610 entries · CC-BY 4.0

Dictionary termTrack CStablev2026.2

Frontier model

A foundation model whose capabilities meet or exceed the most advanced publicly known systems at the time of training, often defined operationally by training-compute thresholds or by performance on canonical benchmarks.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

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Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A model whose training run exceeded 10^25 FLOPs and that is subject to systemic-risk obligations under the EU AI Act.
Is an instance
A frontier-lab model voluntarily disclosed to the UK AISI under the pre-deployment access agreement.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A 7B-parameter open-weight model usable on a single GPU.
Not an instance
A task-specific classifier trained for one application.

Editorial commentary

The term 'frontier model' came into widespread use through 2023-2024 policy discussions (UK AI Safety Institute, US Executive Order 14110) as a proxy for 'most capable model class', often via training-compute thresholds (e.g., > 10^25 or > 10^26 FLOPs). The definition is intentionally moving so that the term tracks the technological frontier.

References

UK AI Safety Institute publications; US Executive Order 14110 (2023); EU AI Act systemic-risk-model provisions.

Also known as

frontier AI model

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

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      vocab-term="Frontier model"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/frontier-model" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

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  "sameAs": [
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  "dateModified": "2026-05-21T02:22:51",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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