The EU delays its high-risk AI rules

The AI Act's obligations for high-risk systems, the testing, documentation, human oversight and registration required for AI in hiring, credit, education, policing and medical devices, were due to apply on 2 August 2026. The technical standards the obligations depended on were late, the companies said they could not comply, and the American administration had made the Act's burden a trade issue. In November 2025 the Commission proposed a Digital Omnibus to simplify the law; negotiations nearly collapsed in April 2026; political agreement came on 7 May; and Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 was published on 24 July and entered into force on 27 July, six days before the deadline it moved.

Standalone high-risk systems now have until 2 December 2027, and AI embedded in products already covered by EU safety law until 2 August 2028, with neither date conditional on further decisions. The rules on prohibited practices and on general-purpose models, already in force, were untouched, and Article 50's transparency duties, telling people when they are talking to a machine and labelling synthetic media and deepfakes, took effect on 2 August 2026 as planned.

The Omnibus is on this timeline as the moment the most ambitious AI law in the world met the pace of the technology and the pressure of its competitors, and gave ground on both.