EU AI Act: regulatory framework for AI (European Commission)

What it is

This is the European Commission's own page on the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), the first broad law on AI from a major regulator. It explains the Act in plain language and links to the official guidelines, codes of practice and FAQs the Commission has published since.

What you will learn

• The four risk tiers. Unacceptable risk (banned outright), high risk (strict requirements before and after the system goes to market), transparency risk (people must be told they are dealing with AI or with AI-generated content) and minimal risk (no new obligations).
• Prohibited practices. Such as social scoring, untargeted scraping of facial images to build recognition databases, emotion recognition at work and in education, and, since a 2026 amendment, AI that generates non-consensual intimate imagery or child sexual abuse material.
• General-purpose AI models. Obligations for the providers of large models, with extra duties for models with systemic risk, and the voluntary Code of Practice that helps providers show compliance.
• The timeline. As of the page's August 2026 update: the Act entered into force on 1 August 2024; prohibitions and AI literacy duties applied from 2 February 2025; governance rules and general-purpose AI obligations from 2 August 2025; and most remaining rules, including transparency, from 2 August 2026.

The 2026 change you must know

The Commission proposed a "Digital Omnibus" simplification package on 19 November 2025. For AI, the Parliament and Council reached political agreement on 7 May 2026 and the amending regulation entered into force on 27 July 2026. It moved the high-risk deadlines: high-risk systems in sensitive areas listed in Annex III (such as biometrics, critical infrastructure, education, employment, migration and asylum) now apply from 2 December 2027, and high-risk AI built into regulated products (Annex I) from 2 August 2028. Many articles and courses written before mid-2026 still show the old 2 August 2026 date for high-risk systems, so check the date on anything you read.

Is it worth your time?

Yes, for anyone heading into AI governance, risk or compliance work, and for engineers who build AI products used in Europe. It is the primary source: blog posts and vendor summaries are useful, but they go stale and sometimes get the dates wrong. Read this page first, then use the AI Act Service Desk to read the articles themselves.

How to use it

Read the overview once, write the timeline down in your own notes with the date you checked it, and come back each quarter. When you write a risk assessment or an inventory, quote the article number, not a summary.

Free or paid?

Free. All Commission pages, guidelines and the legal text on EUR-Lex are free to read.