Frontier AI refers to highly capable general-purpose AI models that can perform a wide range of tasks and may match or exceed the capabilities of today’s most advanced models. The term is often used in policy and safety contexts because such systems may create novel risks.
Defined by the Government Office for Science as 'highly capable general-purpose AI models that can perform a wide variety of tasks and match or exceed the capabilities present in today's most advanced models'. Currently, this primarily encompasses a few large language models including ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), and Bard (Google).