Can an AI company keep its energy consumption secret under Europe’s transparency rules?

On 9 December 2023, the European Parliament announced a political agreement on the AI Act. Its statement said high-impact general-purpose AI models with systemic risk would face additional obligations, including having to “report on their energy efficiency.” That was a claim about reporting. It did not identify a public energy report that anyone could inspect.

The final law, approved by the Council on 21 May 2024, makes the distinction concrete. Energy consumption belongs in documentation available to regulators. It is absent from the minimum information owed to downstream providers. The expressly public summary concerns training content, not electricity.

Who gets the energy figure?

Article 53(1)(a) requires providers of general-purpose AI models to prepare and maintain technical documentation. It must cover training, testing and evaluation, and contain at least the information in Annex XI. Providers must supply it to the AI Office and national competent authorities upon request.

Annex XI requires the model’s known or estimated energy consumption. It also requires information about the computational resources used to train the model, including the number of floating-point operations and training time.

The annex expressly permits energy consumption to be based on information about computational resources when consumption is unknown. A compliant figure need not come from a dedicated electricity meter. The record can contain an estimate rather than a direct measurement.

This is an obligation to create documentation and make it available to specified authorities. Article 53(1)(a) does not instruct the provider to publish it, place it in a public register or attach it to a model’s download page. The recipient matters as much as the required figure.

What reaches the next company?

Article 53(1)(b) creates a different disclosure route. Providers must prepare, update and make information available to companies intending to integrate the general-purpose model into their AI systems.

That information must let those companies understand the model’s capabilities and limitations and meet their own obligations under the Act. The minimum contents come from Annex XII, not Annex XI.

Annex XII covers matters including the model’s intended tasks, acceptable-use policies, architecture, input and output formats, and information about training, testing and validation data. It does not include Annex XI’s energy-consumption requirement.

The distinction is deliberate in the text, whatever one concludes about the policy. Article 53 sends one package to regulators and specifies another package for downstream providers. It does not make the second package a copy of the first.

Annex XII is a minimum, so its omission is not a prohibition on sharing energy data. Nor does it settle every request that might arise under the broader integration duty. It does mean that the Act does not expressly give every downstream customer the energy figure required for regulators.

What must actually be public?

Article 53(1)(d) uses language missing from the technical-documentation duty. Providers must draw up and “make publicly available” a sufficiently detailed summary of the content used to train the model. The AI Office supplies the template.

The comparison thus solves the crucial problem for this argument. The legislation clearly has a way of saying when documentation is to be made public, it says so for the training content summary but not for Annex XI's energy consumption.

The duties also concern different subjects. A description of training content is not an electricity account. Publishing the first does not satisfy the requirement to document the second. Equally, requiring the second in a regulatory file does not turn it into a public disclosure.

Thus, Article 53 does not justify the general proposition that the EU mandates AI companies to publish energy consumption data of their models. Instead, it justifies a limited one: certain providers are required to document consumption but provide a summary of training in a publicly available manner.

Does every model face that duty?

Not under identical conditions. Article 53(2) exempts certain models released under qualifying free and open-source licences from the documentation and downstream-information duties in paragraphs 1(a) and 1(b). The exemption requires public availability of parameters, including weights, architecture information and usage information.

That exemption does not apply to models with systemic risk. Nor does it remove the copyright-policy and public training-summary duties. Calling a release open source is not enough to establish the statutory exemption.

The dates also matter. The Commission’s implementation timetable identifies 2 August 2025 as the application date for general-purpose AI obligations. Article 111(3) gives providers of models placed on the market before that date until 2 August 2027 to comply.

Those are the dates in the enacted framework. A model’s release conditions, systemic-risk status and market-entry date determine whether the Annex XI duty applies, rather than the transparency label alone.

Can trade secrecy defeat the regulator?

Article 78 requires the Commission, market-surveillance authorities and other participants implementing the Act to protect confidential information. Its protections include intellectual property and confidential business information or trade secrets.

The Trade Secrets Directive supplies a narrower definition than information a company would prefer not to discuss. Article 2 requires secrecy, commercial value because of that secrecy, and reasonable steps to preserve it.

All of these provisions safeguard confidentiality of the data processed within the framework of the regulation. It does not abolish the need to submit all required documents upon request from the relevant authorities under Article 53. Confidentiality should not serve as a replacement.

Public access involves another legal route. Regulation 1049/2001 governs access to documents held by EU institutions and includes protection for commercial interests, subject to an overriding public interest. For environmental information, Regulation 1367/2006 modifies that framework, including special treatment for information relating to emissions into the environment.

Whether a particular model-energy record must be released would require applying those rules to that record. An electricity estimate is not automatically a public emissions disclosure. Article 53 itself supplies neither a publication duty nor a guarantee of permanent secrecy.

What about the data centre?

The AI Act is not the only European law asking for electricity figures. Article 12 of the Energy Efficiency Directive requires member states to demand specified disclosures from data centres with installed IT power demand of at least 500 kilowatts. Annex VII includes energy consumption among the information concerned, with exceptions for protected information.

Commission Delegated Regulation 2024/1364 establishes the reporting scheme and sustainability indicators. Its database provisions distinguish public aggregated information from access to individual data-centre information. The reporting unit is the facility, not a named general-purpose model.

That distinction prevents an easy substitution. A data-centre electricity figure does not, by itself, allocate consumption among the models and other workloads using the facility. Facility reporting cannot be read as the missing public Annex XI disclosure.

Corporate reporting sits alongside both systems. Microsoft publishes environmental sustainability reports and associated performance data. That is a public corporate reporting channel, not evidence that Article 53 requires publication of each model’s energy documentation. A company can disclose environmental figures without opening the regulatory file at issue here.

Can the company keep it secret?

Yes, from the general public under Article 53’s own disclosure rules. Where the documentation duty applies, the provider must record known or estimated model energy consumption and give the technical documentation to the designated authorities on request. It need not publish that figure or routinely include it in the minimum downstream package. Europe’s AI Act creates regulatory visibility into model energy use. It does not create a general public right to read the number.