Get Ready to Comply: The EU’s AI Act is Now in Force

The European Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act officially came into force on August 1, with most provisions of the regulation applying as of August 2, 2026. However, the regulation states that compliance for prohibited practices should be in effect by February 2, 2025, considering “the unacceptable risk associated with the use of AI in certain ways.”

The European Parliament approved the Act, a major piece of legislation that lays the legal foundation of the European Union’s (EU) regulation of AI platforms, in March. Most of the provisions of the Act are aimed at protecting EU citizens from the worst safety and security risks that have become associated with the use of AI systems. The AI Act bans several uses of AI technologies, including the untargeted scraping of images to create facial recognition databases, emotion recognition in workplace and school settings, and social scoring systems. For EU law enforcement, the AI Act forbids predictive policing and also bans real-time biometric identification (RBI) applications with narrow exceptions for missing persons investigations and terrorist attack prevention.

At the time of approval of the Act in March, many creative and cultural organizations came out asking for additional IP measures to be considered as part of the Act. While the Act acknowledges existing legal frameworks protecting IP rightsholders, the legislative text does very little to establish new rules for the IP issues created by the AI Act’s reporting requirements. For example, general-purpose AI models are required by the AI Act to report data used in their training models, which must be documented “[w]ithout prejudice to the need to respect and protect intellectual property rights and confidential business information or trade secrets in accordance with Union and national law.” High-risk AI applications are similarly required to draft oversight documentation “without compromising their own intellectual property or trade secrets.”

A coalition of European creators and rightsholders in March issued a joint statement welcoming the Act as providing the first tools for creators to enforce their rights with respect to AI models, but they also cautioned that a meaningful implementation process will be key, particularly with respect to the information required of General Purpose AI model providers: “[I]t is essential that the template for the sufficient level of information that General Purpose AI (GPAI) model providers must make available enables effective exercise and enforcement of copyright and other fundamental rights, and that creative sectors and rightsholders are formally and directly involved in its drafting.”

Questions have also been raised about the extraterritorial reach of the AI Act’s reporting requirements on AI businesses that are headquartered in jurisdictions with different copyright regimes. Clause 106 of the AI Act provides that general-purpose AI companies must ensure that their reporting obligations are completed in compliance with Article 4 of the EU’s 2019 Copyright Directive, which creates an exception to EU copyright law for text and data mining used for scientific research. Companies must comply with these provisions of the EU’s Copyright Directive “regardless of the jurisdiction in which the copyright-relevant acts underpinning the training of those general-purpose AI models take place.”

The AI Act states that such a broad application of the Copyright Directive on acts occurring in non-EU companies is necessary to ensure a level playing field so that no AI company operating in the EU can benefit by applying lower copyright standards from their home country. Commentators have pointed out that such a legal framework creates friction with at least United States’ case law surrounding fair uses of copyrighted content for training AI models.

OpenAI published “A Primer on the EU AI Act” on July 30 in which it noted that “further guidance and implementing legislation will be required to define the scope of the law, especially as it applies to GPAI models like OpenAI’s.”

However, the statement added, “we are committed to complying with the Act, not only because this is a legal obligation, but also because the goal of the law aligns with our mission to develop and deploy safe AI to benefit all of humanity.”

OpenAI has been sued by a slew of companies and creators across the United States, the UK, Europe and China for copyright and other violations.

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Author: iqoncept
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