AI regulation in Bulgaria: the EU AI Act (2026)

The Ministry of Electronic Governance told the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency that Bulgaria still lacks a national coordination model, market-surveillance authorities, sanctioning regime, and AI-system register required by the EU AI Act; the deadline for the national regulatory framework was set at March 2026. The Ministry of Finance had already rated a proposed EUR 213,520 AI regulatory laboratory budget as 'low priority' (Council of Ministers decision, 30 October 2025).

Chapter V on general-purpose AI models, governance requirements, and confidentiality rules became enforceable EU-wide; Article 70 required all member states including Bulgaria to designate and notify to the European Commission their national competent authorities and single points of contact. Bulgaria designated the Ministry of Electronic Governance as lead coordinator alongside seven sector-specific market-surveillance bodies.

Bulgaria's Ministry of Defence signed a Memorandum of Understanding with INSAIT to collaborate on AI applications for national security, cybersecurity, and the Armed Forces, the first formal government-research partnership on defence AI in Bulgaria, reflecting growing state interest in sovereign AI capabilities.

INSAIT publicly released BgGPT, an open-source LLM trained on over three billion Bulgarian sentences (7 billion parameters, Apache 2.0 licence), making Bulgaria the first Central and Eastern European country with a publicly developed national LLM. The model supports education, healthcare, public administration, and business applications in Bulgarian.

Bulgaria's Ministry of Education and Science published 41-page non-binding guidelines on the ethical and effective use of AI for teachers, school officials, parents, and students, placing Bulgaria among the first countries globally to issue school-level AI guidance covering pedagogy, risk, evaluation, and teacher training.

Under the Open Government Partnership, Bulgaria committed to developing common standards for AI use in public-sector digitisation to safeguard human rights and equal access. Civil-society and human-rights organisations were brought into the AI working group under the Public Council for Information Technologies, creating an early stakeholder governance mechanism.

The Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology (INSAIT) formally opened in Sofia, co-created with ETH Zurich and EPFL and backed by Google, Amazon, and Bulgarian government funding. INSAIT is structured as a special unit of Sofia University and aims to reverse brain drain by anchoring top-tier AI research in Eastern Europe.

The 46th National Assembly ratified the international framework agreement underpinning INSAIT, giving the institute a firm legal basis and formalising Switzerland's role as a scientific partner, a prerequisite for unlocking both Bulgarian government and private-sector funding commitments.

The Bulgarian Council of Ministers adopted Decision No. 56 to establish INSAIT in partnership with ETH Zurich and EPFL, the first Eastern European country to co-found a world-class AI research centre with leading Swiss federal universities, signalling a strategic pivot toward building sovereign AI research capacity.

Bulgaria's government adopted its foundational national AI strategy, organised around six pillars, infrastructure, education, research, data, sector innovation, and ethics. Developed by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Transport, IT and Communications after public consultation, the Concept aligned with the EU Coordinated Plan on AI and designated the Ministry of e-Governance as central AI coordinator.