What is AI Act (AI Regulation)?
The AI Act is the European law that sets out what AI may and may not do: the bigger the risk, the stricter the rules.
The AI Act (officially the AI Regulation) applies across Europe. The law looks at risk. A spam filter may do almost anything. An AI that helps decide on a job application or a loan faces strict requirements. A few uses are banned outright, such as scraping faces from the internet into a database. The rules arrive in stages, spread over several years.
If you simply use AI as a tool in your work, little changes for you: the requirements sit mainly with whoever builds or deploys the AI. Pay attention if you work with AI that decides about people, because that is where the law bites. The dates still shift, so do not bank on one deadline you heard somewhere.
Put precisely
The requirements sit with whoever builds or deploys AI, not with the individual user. And "high risk" is a legal category with a list, not a feeling: it covers things like AI in hiring, exams, credit and certain government tasks.
Common misconception
That there is one date on which "the AI Act starts". The rules arrive in stages, and those stages have shifted along the way. So do not bank on a single deadline.
Related words
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Last reviewed: 26 July 2026.