AI Reports · GovAI (Oxford) · 2026-10-17 · Research paper
Technical AI Governance Trends in Frontier AI Model Count: A Forecast to 2028 April 2025 Research Paper Iyngkarran Kumar, Sam Manning Governments are starting to impose requirements on AI models based
Governments are starting to set AI requirements based on training compute, such as the EU AI Act's 10^25 FLOP threshold and the US AI Diffusion Framework's 10^26 FLOP threshold. The authors forecast that by the end of 2028, between 103 and 306 foundation models will exceed the 10^25 threshold and 45 to 148 will exceed 10^26 (90% confidence intervals). The number of models crossing absolute thresholds will grow superlinearly each year, whereas relative thresholds tied to the largest training run show a steadier median of 14 to 16 models per year from 2025 to 2028.