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The EU Artificial Intelligence Act enters into force

Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 entered into force on 1 August 2024, twenty days after publication in the Official Journal. It is the first comprehensive legal framework for artificial intelligence adopted anywhere, sorting systems into risk tiers and attaching obligations that scale with the harm a system could do.

Regulation and policy Institutional or legal Deployed

Background

The Commission proposed the Regulation in April 2021. Parliament and the Council reached agreement in December 2023, and the text was published in the Official Journal on 12 July 2024.

Nothing comparable existed. Other jurisdictions had guidance, sectoral rules and voluntary frameworks; none had a binding horizontal law covering artificial intelligence as such.

What happened

The Regulation entered into force on 1 August 2024, the twentieth day after publication. Entering into force is not the same as applying: on that date none of the substantive requirements yet bound anyone. What began was the clock.

The Act sorts systems by the risk they pose and attaches obligations that scale accordingly, from practices prohibited outright to systems carrying no mandatory requirements at all.

What followed

Obligations arrived in stages. Prohibited practices and the AI literacy duties applied from 2 February 2025. Rules for general-purpose model providers applied from 2 August 2025. The bulk of the Regulation applied from 2 August 2026.

It reaches beyond the Union. A provider outside the EU whose system or output reaches the EU market is in scope, which is why companies with no European operations changed their products for it, and why other jurisdictions drafting their own statutes have used it as the reference text.

Why it mattered

Obligations arrived in stages rather than at once: prohibited practices from February 2025, general-purpose model rules from August 2025, and the bulk of the Regulation from August 2026. It binds providers outside the Union whose systems reach the EU market, which is why companies with no European presence changed their products for it.

Sources

Cite this page

AI Achievements. (2024). The EU Artificial Intelligence Act enters into force. Retrieved 2026-08-29, from https://achievements.ai/milestone/eu-artificial-intelligence-act-enters-into-force 

@misc{achievements_eu_artificial_intelligence_act_enters_into_force,
  title  = {The EU Artificial Intelligence Act enters into force},
  author = {{AI Achievements}},
  year   = {2024},
  url    = {https://achievements.ai/milestone/eu-artificial-intelligence-act-enters-into-force}
}