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The EU AI Act enters into force

The first comprehensive law on artificial intelligence takes effect: banned practices, obligations for high-risk systems, and rules for general-purpose models above 10²⁵ operations.

category
policy
significance
4 of 5
people
Thierry Breton, Dragoş Tudorache, Brando Benifei
organisations
European Union

what had to happen · 54 events back to 1943

Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. The organism has the same path lit. Direct influences are marked.

00 · One neuron · 1

  1. 1943A logical calculus of nervous activity

I · Foundations · 11

  1. 1948A mathematical theory of communication
  2. 1949Cells that fire together wire together
  3. 1950Programming a computer for playing chess
  4. 1950Computing machinery and intelligence
  5. 1958The perceptron learns
  6. 1959Samuel's checkers program coins 'machine learning'
  7. 1960ADALINE and the least-mean-squares rule
  8. 1965Moore's law
  9. 1966ELIZA
  10. 1969Perceptrons
  11. 1970Reverse-mode automatic differentiation

W1 · The first winter · 2

  1. 1974Werbos applies backpropagation to neural networks
  2. 1980The Neocognitron

II · Connection · 3

  1. 1982The Hopfield network
  2. 1985The Boltzmann machine
  3. 1986Backpropagation

W2 · The second winter · 6

  1. 1988Temporal-difference learning
  2. 1989Q-learning
  3. 1989LeNet reads handwritten postcodes
  4. 1990Finding structure in time
  5. 1991The vanishing gradient problem
  6. 1992TD-Gammon reaches world-class backgammon

III · Statistics and data · 9

  1. 1997Long short-term memory
  2. 1998MNIST and LeNet-5
  3. 1999The first GPU
  4. 2003A neural probabilistic language model
  5. 2006Deep belief networks and the word 'deep'
  6. 2007CUDA
  7. 2009Deep learning moves to GPUs
  8. 2009ImageNet
  9. 2010Rectified linear units

IV · Deep learning · 9

  1. 2012Google Brain's network discovers cats
  2. 2012Dropout
  3. 2012AlexNet wins ImageNet
  4. 2013Deep Q-networks play Atari
  5. 2014Superintelligence
  6. 2014Attention
  7. 2014Sequence to sequence learning
  8. 2015Batch normalisation
  9. 2015Residual networks

V · Transformers · 8

  1. 2017The Asilomar AI Principles
  2. 2017Attention is all you need
  3. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences
  4. 2018GPT: generative pre-training
  5. 2019GPT-2 and the model too dangerous to release
  6. 2020Scaling laws for neural language models
  7. 2020GPT-3
  8. 2020Learning to summarise from human feedback

VI · Everyone · 5

  1. 2022InstructGPT
  2. 2022ChatGPT
  3. 2023GPT-4direct
  4. 2023'Pause Giant AI Experiments'
  5. 2023The Bletchley Declarationdirect

The European Commission had proposed an AI regulation in April 2021, before ChatGPT, built around risk categories for uses: some banned, such as social scoring and most real-time facial recognition by police; some high-risk, such as hiring, credit and medical devices, with obligations for testing and oversight; the rest lightly touched. The arrival of general-purpose models forced a late addition, and the version the Parliament adopted on 13 March 2024 added obligations for foundation models, with extra ones for those trained above 10²⁵ floating-point operations, deemed to carry systemic risk. The Act was published in July and entered into force on 1 August 2024.

It applied in stages. The prohibitions took effect in February 2025 and the general-purpose model rules, with a code of practice the major laboratories signed, in August 2025. The high-risk obligations were due in August 2026, until the Digital Omnibus of July 2026 pushed them to December 2027 and August 2028 under industry pressure.

The Act is on this timeline as the first law to define frontier models by the compute used to train them, and as the reference point for every other jurisdiction's debate about whether to regulate the technology at all.

what it led to · 4 events downstream, through 2026

Built on it directly:

  1. 2025America's AI Action PlanVII
  2. 2026The EU delays its high-risk AI rulesVII

And, through them, by era:

VII · Agents · 2
  1. 2026Claude Fable 5 and the Mythos class
  2. 2026Claude Fable 5.1

sources · 2

Trace the lineage of this event on the timeline →Back to the ledger