The Bank of Spain signed a strategic memorandum of understanding with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center–National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) to cooperate on artificial intelligence initiatives relevant to the financial sector, spanning research infrastructure, potential new research programmes, and experimentation frameworks. Under the agreement, BSC-CNS will support the Bank of Spain in assessing computational needs for research projects. The two institutions will also examine launching a social sciences research programme that could include analysis of AI applications in finance, explore the design and development of a regulatory testing environment (sandbox) to allow the supervisor to assess new financial technologies in a controlled setting, and study the use of the ALIA language model within the Bank of Spain alongside the development of more advanced AI models for specific uses such as data analysis and economic projections. The sandbox work is framed in the context of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence regulation approved in 2023 and the possibility that the Bank of Spain could be designated as the market surveillance authority for the banking sector.