EU AI Act Amended: The Digital Omnibus Timeline
What moved to 2027. What's been enforceable since 2025. And everything in between.
If you’ve spent the last six months preparing for August 2, 2026 — building documentation, mapping your AI systems, having the vendor conversations, dragging your product team into compliance meetings they didn’t want to attend — I have news.
On May 7, at 4:30 in the morning, the European Parliament and the Council reached a deal to amend the EU AI Act. The high-risk AI obligations that were supposed to hit in August 2026? Pushed to December 2027. Some of them to August 2028.
You can exhale.
For about ten seconds.
Because not everything moved. The prohibited practices have applied since February 2025 — and national authorities have had the power to enforce them since August 2025. AI literacy obligations kicked in on the same February date, with enforcement beginning August 2026. Transparency obligations still land in August 2026. The omnibus gave you more time on one thing. The rest didn't move.
That’s the trap. The headline says “delayed”. The fine print says “some of it”.
A note on sources: The full text of the provisional agreement isn’t public yet. Everything in this article — and in every law firm alert and media analysis published since May 7 — is based on the Council’s press release, the European Parliament’s legislative documentation, and secondary analysis. I’ve cross-checked across multiple sources and flagged where things are uncertain. But until the full text drops, treat the details with the care you’d give any legal analysis built on a press release rather than a regulation. I’ll update this piece when the text is published.
What Happened
The Digital Omnibus on AI. Part of the Commission’s broader “simplification” agenda launched in late 2025. Targeted amendments to the AI Act — not a rewrite, but surgical changes to delay, simplify, and clarify.
The first trilogue on April 28 collapsed after 12 hours of talks. The sticking point was how to handle AI systems embedded in products already regulated by other EU safety laws — the double regulation problem. Nine days later, the negotiators came back and struck a deal before dawn.
The omnibus still needs formal adoption by both the Parliament and Council, legal-linguistic revision, and publication in the Official Journal. The co-legislators intend to finish all of that before August 2, 2026 — the date the original high-risk deadline would otherwise kick in. Tight timeline. Strong political will. Nobody wants to be the reason it slips.
What the omnibus is not: a repeal. The EU AI Act’s core architecture is intact. The prohibited practices aren’t touched. The GPAI rules aren’t touched. The transparency obligations aren’t touched. What moved is the high-risk timeline and the enforcement architecture around it.
What’s Already In Force — Unchanged
Everyone is writing about what moved. But I also want to list what didn’t.
February 2, 2025 — already enforceable:
Article 5 — the prohibited practices. Eight bans on unacceptable-risk AI. Social scoring, manipulative AI, real-time remote biometric identification (with exceptions), emotion recognition in workplaces and schools, untargeted scraping for facial recognition databases. Applicable since February 2025. National enforcement powers followed in August 2025. Penalties: up to EUR 35 million or 7% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.
Article 4 — AI literacy. The obligation to ensure your staff understands the AI systems they’re working with. Also in force since February 2025. Enforcement begins August 2026 — three months from now. If you’ve been treating this as a future problem, it isn’t one.
August 2, 2025 — already applicable:
GPAI model obligations. Articles 51-56. Transparency, documentation, copyright compliance, systemic risk assessment for high-capability models. If you’re a provider of a general-purpose AI model, you’re already in scope. The AI Office enforces this.
Governance structures — the AI Board, Scientific Panel, Advisory Forum — all required to be operational. Member States were supposed to have designated national competent authorities and adopted national penalty laws by this date.
What Still Lands in August 2026 — Unchanged
August 2, 2026 — not delayed by the omnibus:
Transparency obligations under Article 50. If your AI system interacts with people, they need to know. Deepfake labelling. AI-generated content disclosure. Still on the original schedule.
National enforcement begins. Market surveillance authorities start supervising. This is when regulators gain teeth — for everything already in force plus the transparency rules.
GPAI enforcement powers. The AI Office can start imposing fines on GPAI providers.
August 2, 2026 was supposed to be the date when everything came into force — the full high-risk regime, transparency, enforcement, etc. The omnibus carved out the high-risk obligations. It left everything else.
What Moved & The Actual Changes
December 2, 2026 — new:
Two things land here, and one of them is new.
The nudification and CSAM ban. A new addition to Article 5’s list of prohibited practices. AI systems used to generate child sexual abuse material or non-consensual intimate imagery are prohibited — including systems placed on the market without reasonable safety measures to prevent that use. Penalty tier is the highest one. EUR 35 million or 7% of global turnover. This isn’t a delay. It’s a tightening. While everything else in the omnibus is about giving industry more time, this one moved in the opposite direction.
Watermarking obligations. Providers must implement marking of AI-generated content. The grace period for systems already on the market was reduced from six months to three.
December 2, 2027 — delayed from August 2, 2026:
High-risk obligations for Annex III systems. These are the standalone high-risk AI systems — classified by use case, not by product category. Biometric identification. Critical infrastructure. Education and vocational training. Employment and workers management. Credit scoring and access to essential services. Law enforcement. Migration and border control. Administration of justice.
This is the big one. The most-discussed change. The one that made every compliance officer’s calendar just shift by 16 months.
August 2, 2028 — delayed from August 2, 2026:
High-risk obligations for Annex I systems — AI embedded in products regulated by other EU sectoral safety legislation. Medical devices. In vitro diagnostics. Aviation. Motor vehicles. Railway systems. Marine equipment. Machinery. Toys. Radio equipment. This is eight months after the Annex III deadline.
These are fixed dates. You can plan around them.
Other changes worth knowing:
National regulatory sandboxes — deadline for Member States to establish at least one pushed from August 2026 to August 2027. A new EU-level sandbox operated by the AI Office, with priority access for SMEs, startups, and small mid-caps.
SME privileges extended to small mid-cap companies (up to 750 employees, with turnover and balance sheet ceilings — exact thresholds to be confirmed from the final text). Simplified documentation. Proportionate quality management. Tailored penalty caps.
The machinery carve-out — the issue that collapsed the first trilogue. AI systems in machinery products no longer face double compliance (AI Act + Machinery Regulation). They comply with the Machinery Regulation only. But this carve-out is limited to machinery. Medical devices, lifts, radio equipment — still dual compliance.
The EU high-risk database registration obligation — reinstated. The Commission had proposed to remove the requirement for providers to register AI systems they’d self-assessed as non-high-risk. Both Parliament and Council said no. If you determine your system isn’t high-risk, you still register that determination. Regulators — and the public — can see who’s claiming exemptions.
The updated timeline
Feb 2, 2025 — Prohibited practices (Art. 5) + AI literacy (Art. 4) — already in force
Aug 2, 2025 — GPAI obligations + governance + national authority designation — already in force
Aug 2, 2026 — Transparency (Art. 50) + enforcement begins + GPAI enforcement — unchanged
Dec 2, 2026 — Nudification/CSAM ban + watermarking — NEW
Aug 2, 2027 — GPAI legacy compliance + national sandbox deadline — sandbox delayed 1 year
Dec 2, 2027 — High-risk: Annex III (biometrics, employment, education, law enforcement…) — DELAYED
Aug 2, 2028 — High-risk: Annex I (AI in regulated products — medical devices, machinery…) — DELAYED
The Traps in the Fine Print
The two-date trap. If someone on your team says “high-risk was pushed to 2027” — they’re half right. Annex III systems (classified by use case) hit December 2, 2027. Annex I systems (AI embedded in regulated products) hit August 2, 2028. That’s an eight-month gap. If your AI systems span both categories, you’re planning for two deadlines, not one. And if you’re not sure which category your system falls into — that’s the question to answer first.
The enforcement paradox. National supervisory authorities start enforcing in August 2026. But the high-risk obligations — the most substantial compliance requirements in the entire Act — just moved to 2027 and 2028. So what are regulators actually doing from August 2026?
Enforcing the prohibited practices. AI literacy. Transparency obligations. GPAI compliance (primarily the AI Office). That’s lighter than the full high-risk regime — but it’s real. If you’ve been ignoring AI literacy because you were focused on the high-risk deadline, August 2026 is still your problem. Regulators will ask what you’ve been doing since February 2025. Fifteen months of nothing is not a defensible answer.
The permission to procrastinate. This is the most predictable outcome of the delay — and the most dangerous for the companies doing it.
The requirements aren’t changing. Only the deadline moved. The risk management system, the quality management, the technical documentation, the conformity assessment, the human oversight, the logging — all of it is still coming. Companies that treat December 2027 as permission to deprioritise will be scrambling again in 18 months. Same panic. Same compressed timelines. Different year.
The companies that keep going — using the extra time for quality instead of delay — will be the ones who are actually ready.
The One Thing That Got Tighter
While everything else in the omnibus is about giving industry more time, the nudification ban went the other direction. A new prohibited practice. Added to Article 5. Effective December 2, 2026.
It covers AI systems designed to generate CSAM, AI systems that create non-consensual intimate imagery of identifiable persons, and — critically — AI systems placed on the market without effective safety measures to prevent that use. That third prong matters. It means GPAI model providers need content safeguards robust enough to qualify. What “effective safety measures” means in practice isn’t defined yet. But the penalty tier is the maximum one.
Worth remembering — the next time someone tells you the omnibus is just about deregulation.
The Political Context
More than 127 civil society organisations — including Amnesty International, European Digital Rights, the European Disability Forum, and the European Network Against Racism — opposed the omnibus.
Their argument is that the systems most likely to affect vulnerable people — biometric surveillance, AI in law enforcement, AI in employment, AI in education — now get 1-2 more years without full compliance requirements. That’s not simplification, they say. That’s rollback.
The Commission’s counter-argument is practical: harmonized standards aren’t ready, and companies can’t comply with rules when the measurement tools don’t exist. Both positions are legitimate. Both are worth knowing.
What to Do Now
Were you preparing for August 2026 high-risk compliance? Don’t stop. Shift the goal to December 2027 (Annex III) or August 2028 (Annex I). Use the runway for quality, not delay.
Been ignoring AI literacy? That’s your most immediate problem. Enforcement starts August 2026. Three months from today.
GPAI model providers have a near-term clock — nudification safeguards by December 2026. AI Office enforcement powers from August.
Mid-size companies under 750 employees should check whether they qualify for the new small mid-cap category. Simplified documentation. Lighter compliance. Worth knowing before you build the full-scale programme.
And if you’re not sure whether your AI system is even high-risk — start there. The classification question determines everything else. The omnibus didn’t change the classification rules. Just the deadline for complying with what follows.
The AI Act is 21 months old. It’s already been amended before it’s fully in effect. More amendments are coming — the Commission has said so. The regulation that was supposed to be a settled text is becoming a moving one.
But underneath the shifting deadlines, the obligations that have been running since February 2025 haven’t stopped. AI literacy. The prohibited practices. Those don’t have a new date. They have an old one — and it already passed.
The omnibus gave you time. Not a pardon.
I think one of the most important points in all of this is hidden inside the phrase:
“the omnibus gave you time, not a pardon.”
Because many of the hardest governance problems were never really about documentation deadlines to begin with.
The deeper problem is that highly capable systems increasingly participate in real-world relational and operational continuity long before regulatory structures fully understand how to govern the downstream consequences.
Which means delaying compliance timelines does not delay:
uncertainty,
interaction,
behavioral influence,
or consequence propagation.
And that’s probably why runtime governance, epistemic accountability, and continuity-aware system design are becoming more important than static compliance snapshots alone.
The question is slowly shifting from:
“Was the system compliant at deployment?”
to:
“How does the system remain accountable to what it sets into motion after deployment?”