AI Governance and EU AI Act

Practical governance steps for teams shipping AI products in Europe.

EU AI Act timeline

August 1, 2024

EU AI Act entered into force.

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February 2, 2025

Rules on prohibited AI practices and AI literacy obligations began applying.

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August 2, 2025

General-purpose AI model obligations began applying.

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August 2, 2026

Most remaining obligations begin applying for covered systems.

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Operational checklist

  • Assign one accountable AI owner and one legal owner.
  • Inventory AI use-cases by risk and business impact.
  • Document training data origin, model version, and deployment scope.
  • Establish human-override rules for high-impact decisions.
  • Create audit logs for prompts, outputs, and user actions.
  • Define incident response for harmful outputs and policy breaches.
  • Review every deployment against legal and internal policy checklists.