AI Act, 2 August 2026: What Arrived, and What Was Deferred to December 2027
Six dates, not one — and three of them have already passed. Six days before the deadline, the Digital Omnibus moved the high-risk regime to 2027. What Article 4 has required since February 2025, what Article 50 still adds on 2 August 2026, what was deferred and what was not — and the one question on
Most coverage of the EU AI Act still quotes a single date: 2 August 2026. That date did arrive — but it no longer carries what almost everyone thinks it carries.
Six days before it, on 27 July 2026, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 — the Digital Omnibus on AI — entered into force and amended Article 113. The high-risk regime was deferred. The requirements themselves were not changed; only the date on which they bite, because the harmonised standards and the national competent authorities were not ready.
Article 113's third paragraph now reads, in the amending instrument's own words:
"(a) Chapters I and II shall apply from 2 February 2025, with the exception of Article 5(1), first subparagraph, points (ba) and (bb), and Article 5(1a) and (1b) which shall apply from 2 December 2026;"
"(c) Chapter III, Sections 1, 2, and 3, with the exception of Article 6(5), shall apply from: (i) 2 December 2027 as regards AI systems classified as high-risk pursuant to Article 6(2) and Annex III; and (ii) 2 August 2028 as regards AI systems classified as high-risk pursuant to Article 6(1) and Annex I;"
"(d) Articles 102 to 110 shall apply from 27 July 2026."
Unpacked, that is six dates, not four:
| From | What starts applying |
|---|---|
| 2 February 2025 | Article 4 (AI literacy) and Article 5 (prohibited practices) — Chapters I and II |
| 2 August 2025 | Chapter V — general-purpose AI model obligations |
| 2 August 2026 | The Regulation generally, and Article 50 transparency — not deferred |
| 2 December 2026 | The Article 5 prohibitions inserted by the Omnibus, and the Article 50(2) catch-up for systems already on the market |
| 2 December 2027 | Article 6(2)/Annex III high-risk — deferred from 2 August 2026 |
| 2 August 2028 | Article 6(1) high-risk safety components — deferred from 2 August 2027 |
Three of those are behind us. Two things follow. If your plan was "we will look at this in August", it already had a hole in it. And if you were told in July that Annex III classification was due this month, that advice is now sixteen months out of date — the obligation is real, the deadline is not.
The one nobody has written down
Article 4 is one sentence:
"Providers and deployers of AI systems shall take measures to support the development of AI literacy of their staff and other persons dealing with the operation and use of AI systems on their behalf, taking into account their technical knowledge, experience, education and training and the context the AI systems are to be used in, and considering the persons or groups of persons on whom the AI systems are to be used. This obligation does not require providers or deployers to guarantee any specific level of AI literacy of any individual."
That is Article 4 as replaced by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744. The original required firms to "ensure, to their best extent, a sufficient level" of literacy. The Omnibus softened it to a duty of effort and added the sentence expressly disclaiming any guaranteed level — because, in the Commission's words, stringent obligations "would not be suitable for all types of providers and deployers" and created a compliance burden that fell hardest on smaller firms.
It is still binding. It is simply now an obligation to act, not to achieve.
Read what it does not say. It sets no interval, no syllabus, no certificate, and no exemption for low-risk systems. It applies to providers and deployers — which is to say, to a company using an off-the-shelf CV screener just as much as to one selling a model.
It has been binding since 2 February 2025.
For a small firm this is simultaneously the easiest obligation to satisfy and the one most likely to have nothing behind it. A forty-minute internal session on what your tools do, where they go wrong, and who to tell when they do, is a defensible measure. What is not defensible is having done it and kept no record — because the obligation an authority can check is the one you can evidence.
So the practical minimum is a list: who touches which AI system, what they did, when, and where the proof lives. Not a certificate scheme. A list.
What actually arrived on 2 August 2026
One thing, not two — and this is the part most coverage still gets wrong.
Article 50 transparency arrived. Annex III high-risk did not. The classification exercise below is still the exercise you have to do; you now have until 2 December 2027 to have the Chapter III programme behind it. Treat that as time to do it properly, not as permission to forget it — a sixteen-month extension has a way of becoming a fourteen-month one.
Article 6(2) and Annex III — high-risk classification, from 2 December 2027. Annex III lists eight areas, in the Regulation's own words: Biometrics; Critical infrastructure; Education and vocational training; Employment, workers management and access to self-employment; Access to and enjoyment of essential private services and essential public services and benefits; Law enforcement; Migration, asylum and border control management; Administration of justice and democratic processes.
If a system falls in one of those areas, high-risk is the default and Chapter III's obligations follow — risk management, data governance, technical documentation, record-keeping, transparency, human oversight, accuracy, robustness, cybersecurity. That is a substantial programme, and it is why the classification question matters more than any other decision you will make about a system.
Article 50 — transparency. Lighter, and easy to overlook because it applies on top of whatever tier a system lands in. Four duties: a provider must tell people they are interacting with an AI system unless it is obvious (50(1)); a provider must mark synthetic audio, image, video or text in a machine-readable format so it is detectable as artificially generated (50(2)); a deployer of an emotion recognition or biometric categorisation system must inform the people exposed to it (50(3)); and a deployer producing deep fakes must disclose that the content is artificially generated or manipulated (50(4)).
A minimal-risk system can still owe Article 50(1). A high-risk one owes it as well as everything else. The duties stack.
Note the dates that are NOT 2 August 2026
The general-purpose AI model obligations in Chapter V applied from 2 August 2025 — a year earlier. If you build on a general-purpose model, the Chapter V duties fall on that model's provider, not on you as a deployer. What you need on file is the documentation that provider is required to give you. Chasing it is a procurement task, and it is one you were already late for.
And Article 6(1) — the route by which a system is high-risk because it is a safety component of a product covered by the Annex I harmonisation legislation — has its own date of 2 August 2028, deferred by the Omnibus from 2 August 2027. Two different routes into "high-risk", now eight months apart. A register that merges them puts a wrong deadline on a report; a register that never updated for the Omnibus puts a wrong deadline on every report.
The question that is easiest to answer wrongly
Article 6(3) lets an Annex III system out of high-risk. It is the most attractive answer on any classification form, and it is worth being precise about what it actually offers.
A system in an Annex III area is not high-risk where it "does not pose a significant risk of harm to the health, safety or fundamental rights of natural persons" and one of four conditions holds: it performs a narrow procedural task; it improves the result of a previously completed human activity; it detects decision-making patterns or deviations without replacing or influencing the previous human assessment absent proper review; or it performs a preparatory task to an assessment.
Three things follow that get lost in the summary version.
First, the carve-out has a carve-out: "An AI system referred to in Annex III shall always be considered to be high-risk where the AI system performs profiling of natural persons." No derogation survives profiling. If your tool scores individual people, the discussion is over.
Second, the "no significant risk of harm" test is a separate precondition, not a fifth alternative. All four conditions are downstream of it.
*Third — and this is the part that surprises people — claiming the derogation creates* an obligation.** A provider relying on it "shall document its assessment before that system is placed on the market or put into service", and must provide that documentation to the competent authority on request. Claiming you are out of scope is not an escape from paperwork. It is paperwork, and paperwork you have to have written before the system goes live.
What "written down" actually means
Working backwards from what an authority could ask for, the minimum is:
- A list of AI systems, each recorded against the role you hold for it. Article 3 distinguishes provider (3(3)), deployer (3(4)), importer (3(6)) and distributor (3(7)), and the duties are not the same. The same company is routinely the deployer of one tool and the provider of another, and this is exactly the distinction a spreadsheet loses.
- A classification per system, with the article it rests on and the date it was made — not just a colour. If you relied on Article 6(3), which of the four conditions, and the assessment behind it.
- The Article 4 record, per person.
- Named human oversight for anything high-risk: a person with the authority to stop the system, and how they stop it. "The team oversees it" is not an answer; an authority nobody can exercise is not oversight.
- The general-purpose models you build on, and whether you hold the provider's documentation.
None of that requires a platform. It requires a decision per system, recorded with its reasoning, on a date. A spreadsheet can hold it; so can a register built for it, like Aiactora. What matters is that the decision, the article and the date end up in the same row.
If the same company also places products with digital elements on the EU market, a second dated obligation lands three weeks later: the Cyber Resilience Act's reporting duties start on 11 September 2026, and that one is a 24-hour clock.
Where this leaves a small firm
The honest summary: two obligations are already live and one of them (Article 4) probably has nothing behind it; a third — the Annex III high-risk programme — was due this month and now falls on 2 December 2027; and the single highest-value hour you can spend is still writing down what you run, who owns it, and which article you think applies. The deferral bought time to do the classification properly. It did not remove the classification, and it did not touch Article 4 or Article 50, both of which are live now.
Aiactora is our self-hosted register for exactly this: systems recorded against the Article 3 role you hold, a classification questionnaire that returns the article and the date rather than a colour, and the Article 4 literacy record. It runs on your own server, one payment. Nothing in this guide is legal advice — where the Regulation leaves a judgement to your organisation, so does the register.