On August 2, 2026, the European Union's landmark AI Act stops being a set of deadlines on paper and starts having teeth. From that day, the European Commission can supervise the companies that build the most powerful AI models — and fine them if it chooses.
The Act splits general-purpose AI into two tiers. A lighter regime applies to every model maker, who must publish a summary of what went into training the model, updated every six months. A heavier tier targets only the handful of labs building models judged to carry 'systemic risk' — presumed when training used more than 10^25 floating-point operations, a rough measure of raw computing power. Industry estimates put the number of such models at around a dozen globally.
For those providers, the Commission's AI Office gains three significant authorities: requesting documents, running evaluations with access to source code, and demanding action up to pulling a model off the market. Joel Christoph, writing in Lawfare, describes them as 'among the most far-reaching regulatory powers any government has claimed over frontier AI.' Non-compliance can bring fines of up to 3% of global annual turnover or €15 million, whichever is higher.
Two gaps remain. The first is definitional: what counts as a 'sufficiently detailed' training summary is unsettled, and the Commission will not audit training data itself, acting instead on complaints and alerts from its scientific panel. The second is staffing: the AI Office employs more than 125 people across over a hundred responsibilities under the Act, and hiring for its safety unit has been slow. As Christoph put it: 'The tools are on the table. The question is whether anyone picks them up.'
