The AI Assessment Sandbox Configurator: A Framework to Support Technical Assessment in AI Regulatory Sandboxes

Abstract

The EU's Artificial Intelligence Act requires all Member States to establish AI Regulatory Sandboxes (AIRS) by August 2027: supervised environments bringing together national Competent Authorities, technical experts, and the organisations under assessment. When AIRS engagements include structured technical testing, running such testing at scale demands dedicated infrastructure, yet the tooling ecosystem remains structurally fragmented, with heterogeneous tools producing outputs that are difficult to compare, trace, and reuse. From the procedural conditions of AIRS engagements and the AI Act obligations for high-risk systems, we derive 11 architectural and governance requirements for the infrastructure that operationalises technical testing within an AIRS. In response to these requirements, we introduce the AI Assessment Sandbox Configurator, an open-source framework combining a curated Catalogue of tests and controls accessed through a stable plug-in API, a shared data model that harmonises heterogeneous outputs, role-specific dashboards for multi-disciplinary interpretation, and audience-segmented reporting. We describe the architecture and current release, and report an early-stage pilot that exercised the harmonisation and reporting layers within a live AIRS engagement and contributed to an official Exit Report. We discuss the roadmap, the governance questions raised by the Catalogue's tiered contribution model, and the institutional pathways through which an open-source assessment ecosystem could emerge across Member States.