European Commission Publishes AI Act Transparency Obligation Guidelines for Providers and Deployers

The EU’s approach to artificial intelligence promotes excellence and trust, by boosting research and industrial capacity while ensuring safety and fundamental rights. These 2 ambitions are inseparable. To unlock the full potential of AI, Europe must build an ecosystem of excellence that leverages its strengths in research, industrial know-how and regulatory capacity across the AI value chain. At the same time, developing an ecosystem of trust is essential to promote confidence in AI and provide legal certainty for businesses to innovate. To achieve this, Europe’s AI policy approach has been evolving for nearly a decade, resulting in the development of a comprehensive governance framework for AI and a set of concrete instruments covering regulation, capability-building and adoption. Together, these elements guide EU responses to emerging and disruptive innovations. AI Continent Action Plan The AI Continent Action Plan is turning Europe into a global leader in AI by accelerating the development, deployment and uptake of the technology across key sectors like healthcare, education, industry, and environmental sustainability. The plan is to build large-scale AI data and computing infrastructures, increase access to high-quality data, foster AI adoption in strategic sectors, strengthen AI skills and talent and facilitate the implementation of the AI Act. Key components include: The reinforcement of AI Factories and Gigafactories The InvestAI Facility to stimulate private investment AI Act Service Desk, to support a smooth and effective implementation of the AI Act across the EU The future launch of the AI Skills Academy The Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) aims to reduce strategic dependencies and advance the AI Continent Action Plan’s goal of more sovereign, resilient and competitive European AI solutions. CADA will create better conditions for businesses, researchers, and public administrations to innovate and invest in AI and cloud technologies. Apply AI Strategy The Apply AI Strategy complements the AI Continent Action Plan. It aims to harness AI’s transformative potential by increasing AI adoption and integration across key industrial and public sectors, especially among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and support their specific needs. This strategy is boosting EU capabilities to unlock societal benefits, from enabling more accurate medical diagnoses to increasing the accessibility and efficiency of public services. It encourages an AI-first policy, so more companies consider AI as a part of the solution to tackle challenges, while taking into careful consideration the benefits and the risks of the technology. To coordinate AI-related policies and continue the dialogue on EU strategic sectors, the European Commission also launched the Apply AI Alliance. This is a forum made up of AI providers, industry, public sector, academia, social partners and civil society organisations. Closely connected to this forum, the upcoming AI Observatory will track AI trends and assess the impact of AI in specific sectors. AI Act The AI Act introduces a clear, easy-to-understand approach based on 4 different levels of risk - giving AI developers, deployers, and users clarity about how to address risks generated by specific AI uses. The law strikes a balance between promoting AI research and innovation while ensuring Europeans can benefit from safe and trustworthy AI. From 2 August 2026, the AI Office and national authorities started to enforce the AI Act. The Commission is committed to a clear, simple and innovation-friendly implementation of the AI Act. In November 2025, we proposed targeted amendments to the AI Act (the 'AI omnibus') as part of the digital simplification package. The amendments were adopted in June 2026 and entered into force in 27 July 2026. These efforts complement actions already underway to provide clarity for businesses and national authorities. Find an overview of the upcoming guidelines supporting the implementation of the AI Act. AI innovation package and GenAI4EU initiative The 2024 Innovation Package to support AI startups and SMEs was designed to create the conditions to give smaller companies greater access to key ingredients for developing AI: data, computing, algorithms and talent. This also includes access to supercomputing. One key element of this package is the Communication on boosting startups and innovation in trustworthy AI that sets out a strategic investment framework in trustworthy AI. This will enable the EU to capitalise on its assets, in particular its world-leading supercomputing infrastructure, and to foster an innovative European AI ecosystem. Part of the Communication, the GenAI4EU initiative aims to stimulate the uptake of generative AI across the EU’s key strategic industrial ecosystems. In turn, that will encourage the development of large open innovation ecosystems that will boost collaboration between AI startups and deployers of AI in both industrial and public sectors. Important milestones 31 July 2026 27 July 2026 20 July 2026 10 June 2026 03 June 2026 01 June 2026 07 May 2026 24 November 2025 19 November 2025 05 November 2025 08 October 2025 02 August 2025 18 July 2025 10 July 2025 9 April 2025 12 March 2025 11 February 2025 6 February 2025 4 February 2025 10 December 2025 September 2024 1 August 2024 June 2024 January 2024 December 2023 April 2021 February 2020 April 2019 December 2018 June 2018 April 2018