EU AI Act deadline nears
The EU AI Act’s high‑risk enforcement deadline on August 2, 2026 is approaching, pressuring manufacturers to bake in traceability, controls, and documentation for deployed AI systems. At the same time, EU antitrust scrutiny of full‑stack AI dominance raises the possibility that regulation could reshape platform access and competitive dynamics. ( )
Article 12 of the AI Act mandates automatic event‑logging for high‑risk systems with minimum entries such as the start and end date/time of each use to enable lifecycle traceability. (artificialintelligenceact.eu) (artificialintelligenceact.eu) Article 18 requires providers to keep technical documentation, quality‑management records and notified‑body decisions available to national authorities for 10 years after a high‑risk AI system is placed on the market. (artificialintelligenceact.eu) (artificialintelligenceact.eu) Conformity assessment can follow an internal (self‑assessment) route or a third‑party notified‑body route depending on the system’s risk and use case, and providers must implement a quality management system under Article 17. (glocertinternational.com) (glocertinternational.com) Successful conformity assessment leads to an EU declaration of conformity and the right to affix CE marking on high‑risk AI systems as set out in Articles 47–48. (artificialintelligenceact.eu) (artificialintelligenceact.eu) Article 72 obliges providers to run continuous post‑market monitoring and Article 73 requires reporting of serious incidents to market surveillance authorities within 15 days, or within 2 days for incidents that are very serious or widespread. (ai‑act‑service‑desk.ec.europa.eu) (ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu) Article 99 establishes tiered penalties: up to €35 million or 7% of worldwide annual turnover for prohibited practices, and up to €15 million or 3% of turnover for failures in provider/deployer obligations. (ai‑act‑service‑desk.ec.europa.eu) (ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu) Separately, the European Commission opened formal antitrust investigations into Meta’s WhatsApp AI access policy on December 4, 2025 to assess whether it blocks third‑party AI providers, and it opened a probe into Google on December 9, 2025 over use of web publishers’ and YouTube content for AI services. (digital‑strategy.ec.europa.eu) (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) OpenAI formally raised competition concerns with EU antitrust officials on September 24, 2025, flagging “customer lock‑in” and dominance by Alphabet, Microsoft and Apple as barriers for independent AI developers. (bloomberg.com) (bloomberg.com)
