# The EU AI Act's August 2026 deadline is approaching

*2026-04-06 · Governance*

> The bulk of the EU AI Act — including high-risk rules and Article 50 transparency obligations — starts to apply on 2 August 2026.

**What changed.** The EU AI Act is phasing in. Prohibitions applied from February 2025
and general-purpose AI model obligations from August 2025. The next major milestone is
**2 August 2026**, when the majority of the rules — high-risk AI systems (Annex III) and
the **Article 50 transparency** obligations — start to apply, and enforcement begins.

**Why it matters.** If your site uses AI features that touch personal data or interact
with users, governance is no longer optional. Transparency duties (telling people when
they're interacting with AI, and labelling certain AI-generated content) land squarely
on marketing and product teams. The fines are steep — up to €35m or 7% of turnover.

**What to do.** Inventory every place AI touches your site or your customers' data, and
start a compliance note for each — lawful basis, transparency, disclosure. This is the
[agentic defensibility](/guides/agentic-defensibility) work, and the clock is real.

*Tracking: EU AI Act, Article 50 transparency, GPAI.*