When does the AI Act apply, and who does it cover?

A directly applicable Regulation

The AI Act is Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council on artificial intelligence. As a Regulation, it is binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States: no separate implementing Act is needed for it to apply in Slovakia. It entered into force on 1 August 2024, but its rules apply in stages.

When does the AI Act apply?

Article 113, as amended by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, sets the timetable. The current dates are:

• 2 February 2025: general provisions and prohibitions on certain AI practices (Chapters I and II); the prohibitions that the amendment added in Article 5(1), first subparagraph, points (ba) and (bb), and in Article 5(1a) and (1b) apply only from 2 December 2026.
• 2 August 2025: rules for general-purpose AI models, such as large language models, and some governance and penalty provisions.
• 2 August 2026: the general application date remains in place, but this does not mean that all rules for high-risk systems take effect at once.
• 2 December 2027: Chapter III, Sections 1 to 3, except Article 6(5), for high-risk systems under Article 6(2) and Annex III.
• 2 August 2028: the same group of obligations for systems under Article 6(1) linked to regulated products under Annex I.

For a specific system, the transitional rules in Article 111 must also be considered. Postponing the high-risk-system obligations does not automatically postpone the entire AI Act or its general transparency obligations.

The amendment also reached beyond the timetable. A new wording of Article 4 on AI literacy applies from 27 July 2026: the duty to take measures supporting its development remains, but it does not require guaranteeing any specific level of AI literacy of any individual. Providers of systems generating synthetic audio, image, video or text content that were placed on the market before 2 August 2026 also have until 2 December 2026 to comply with the duty to mark such output (Article 50(2)), under Article 111(4).

Who does the AI Act cover?

Its scope is broad (Article 2). It applies particularly to providers placing an AI system or model on the Union market or putting it into service there, even if established in a third country, and to deployers using AI in their activities and established in the Union. It also covers providers and users outside the EU where the system’s output is used in the Union, as well as importers, distributors and manufacturers of products incorporating AI.

Exceptions include purely personal, non-professional use, systems exclusively for military and security purposes, pure scientific research and development, and generally free and open-source software unless it is a high-risk system or a system under Article 5 or 50. In practice, the AI Act covers ordinary companies using AI in recruitment, client assessment or marketing as well as technology businesses.

Which practices are already prohibited?

Since February 2025, certain practices are prohibited entirely under Article 5, including manipulative subliminal techniques, exploitation of vulnerabilities, social scoring, untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet, emotion recognition at work and in schools, and biometric categorisation by sensitive characteristics. Every company’s first step should therefore be to determine whether any tool it uses falls into a prohibited or high-risk category.

Our AI Act compliance service supports tool audits, risk classification, transparency duties and oversight. Since AI closely involves personal data, we usually combine this with GDPR and personal data protection and software licence terms.