Model Card
Definition
A structured document describing an AI model: training data and date, intended use, limitations, evaluation results, known bias patterns, licence and legal terms. Introduced in 2018 (Mitchell et al.), now part of regulatory requirements — including under the AI Act for high-risk systems and GPAI models.
Noise — Signal
Model cards are marketed as "transparency", but in practice rarely deliver any. Providers often publish only the favourable benchmarks and avoid statements about training-data provenance, cutoff date, problematic failure modes or bias tests. A model card that does not disclose what data was used for training and where the model fails is a marketing document.
The right question
Not: "Does the model have a model card?" But: "Which of the regulatorily relevant items for us — training-data provenance, cutoff, documented failure modes, bias tests, licence terms — are contained in the model card, and which gaps must we close before deployment?"