EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) Requirements overview

If Article 5 applies, the correct operational outcome is prevention. These are not use cases you mitigate into compliance through documentation alone. Product and procurement teams need an active gate that screens for manipulation, exploitation of vulnerability, social scoring, prohibited biometric practices, and other listed categories.

Because Article 5 infringements carry the highest penalties, this track should be visible at executive level.

High risk obligations apply through the product safety route in Article 6(1) or the Annex III route in Article 6(2). Once a system is high risk, the provider and deployer evidence standard increases sharply. Articles 9 to 15 set the technical and organizational core, but the surrounding duties on conformity, registration, monitoring, retention, and user information matter just as much.

This track is where most enterprise implementation work sits because it touches architecture, data governance, testing, human oversight, and post market operations.

Article 50 creates obligations where natural persons interact directly with AI systems, where synthetic outputs must be machine readable and detectable, where emotion recognition or biometric categorisation systems are used, and where deepfakes or certain AI generated text are deployed. This work belongs inside product, design, accessibility, editorial, and QA processes.

Transparency is not solved by a generic footer. The notice has to appear in the right interface, at the right moment, and often with technical marking or logging behind it.

Chapter V applies to providers of general purpose AI models. It requires model level technical documentation, downstream documentation, a copyright policy, and a public summary of training content. Systemic risk adds compute threshold monitoring, notification, mitigation, and serious incident response expectations.

Even organizations that are not GPAI providers need to understand this track because they often depend on upstream model suppliers for evidence and contractual support.