Skip to content
forward pass

The EU delays its high-risk AI rules

The Digital Omnibus on AI enters into force six days before the AI Act's high-risk rules would have applied, pushing them to December 2027 and August 2028; transparency duties start on time.

category
policy
significance
3 of 5
people
Henna Virkkunen
organisations
European Union

what had to happen · 57 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 · 7

  1. 2022InstructGPT
  2. 2022ChatGPT
  3. 2023GPT-4
  4. 2023'Pause Giant AI Experiments'
  5. 2023The US executive order on AI
  6. 2023The Bletchley Declaration
  7. 2024The EU AI Act enters into forcedirect

VII · Agents · 1

  1. 2025America's AI Action Plandirect

The AI Act's obligations for high-risk systems, the testing, documentation, human oversight and registration required for AI in hiring, credit, education, policing and medical devices, were due to apply on 2 August 2026. The technical standards the obligations depended on were late, the companies said they could not comply, and the American administration had made the Act's burden a trade issue. In November 2025 the Commission proposed a Digital Omnibus to simplify the law; negotiations nearly collapsed in April 2026; political agreement came on 7 May; and Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 was published on 24 July and entered into force on 27 July, six days before the deadline it moved.

Standalone high-risk systems now have until 2 December 2027, and AI embedded in products already covered by EU safety law until 2 August 2028, with neither date conditional on further decisions. The rules on prohibited practices and on general-purpose models, already in force, were untouched, and Article 50's transparency duties, telling people when they are talking to a machine and labelling synthetic media and deepfakes, took effect on 2 August 2026 as planned.

The Omnibus is on this timeline as the moment the most ambitious AI law in the world met the pace of the technology and the pressure of its competitors, and gave ground on both.

what it led to · 0 events downstream

A leaf, for now. Nothing in the corpus has built on it yet.

sources · 2

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