EU AI Act timeline: what applies when (2024–2027)
A milestone-by-milestone walkthrough of when each part of the AI Act becomes applicable, and what your team should do at each stage.
The EU AI Act entered into force on 1 August 2024, but its obligations land in waves. Here is the practical timeline most teams need to track.
February 2025 — Article 5 prohibitions
Six months after entry into force, the prohibitions in Article 5 became applicable. If your system involves any prohibited practice (subliminal manipulation, social scoring by public authorities, untargeted facial scraping, real-time remote biometric identification in public spaces by law enforcement, etc.), you must stop placing it on the market or putting it into service.
Action: run an Article 5 review now if you haven't already.
August 2025 — GPAI provider obligations
Twelve months after entry into force, the rules for General-Purpose AI providers became applicable. If you place a GPAI model on the EU market, you must:
- maintain technical documentation of the model
- provide downstream-provider information
- implement a copyright policy for training data
- publish a summary of training data
Models with systemic risk (≥10²⁵ FLOP training compute, or specifically designated) carry additional obligations including model evaluation and incident reporting.
August 2026 — High-risk obligations
Twenty-four months after entry into force, the bulk of obligations on high-risk AI systems become applicable. This is the longest single project on most teams' roadmaps:
- risk management system (Article 9)
- data governance (Article 10)
- technical documentation per Annex IV (Article 11)
- automatic logging (Article 12)
- transparency toward deployers (Article 13)
- human oversight (Article 14)
- accuracy, robustness, cybersecurity (Article 15)
- conformity assessment + CE marking (Article 43)
- registration in the EU database (Article 49)
August 2027 — High-risk via product law
Thirty-six months after entry into force, Article 6(1) high-risk classifications kick in for AI that is a safety component of products covered by the harmonised legislation listed in Annex I. Examples: medical devices, machinery, toys.
What to do now
Most teams are best served by working backwards from August 2026. If you ship anything that might be high-risk, you need most of 2026 to get the documentation, conformity assessment, and CE marking in place. The further you are from the deadline, the cheaper the work; sliding into Q2 2026 with no Annex IV draft is a stress test you don't want.
*Documentation tool, not legal advice. Generated by AI Act Kit. Have qualified counsel review documents with legal effect.*
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