EU AI Act timeline for AI agents after the Digital Omnibus (2026–2028)

If you build or run AI agents that reach people in the EU, the dates you planned around in 2025 are partly wrong. The Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, entered into force on 27 July 2026. It pushed the high-risk obligations back by more than a year, but it did not move the transparency duties that hit agents first.

This page sets out the timeline as of October 2026, explains where a typical agent fits, and ends with a checklist for this quarter.

Not legal advice. The AI Act’s obligations depend on your role and your use case, so have counsel confirm your classification. Dates below were checked against the European Commission’s AI Act page and published analyses of the Omnibus. Verify against the consolidated text in the Official Journal before you rely on any of them.

The timeline

Date	What applies	Status (Oct 2026)	Why an agent team cares
1 Aug 2024	AI Act enters into force	Done	The clock starts
2 Feb 2025	Prohibited practices (Art. 5); AI literacy (Art. 4)	Applies	Screen agent use cases against the bans; train the people who run agents
2 Aug 2025	General-purpose AI (GPAI) model obligations; governance bodies	Applies	Obligations sit with model providers, but you rely on their documentation
27 Jul 2026	Digital Omnibus (Reg. (EU) 2026/1744) in force	Applies	The dates below reflect it
2 Aug 2026	General application, including most Art. 50 transparency duties; Commission enforcement powers over GPAI providers	Applies	Customer-facing agents must disclose that people are dealing with AI
2 Dec 2026	New Art. 5 prohibition (AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery and CSAM); Art. 50(2) marking deadline for generative systems already on the market before 2 Aug 2026	Coming	Only matters if your agent generates images, audio, video or text at scale
2 Dec 2027	Annex III high-risk obligations (stand-alone systems: credit, employment, essential services and others)	Coming, moved from 2 Aug 2026	The big one if your agent supports a listed decision
2 Aug 2028	Annex I high-risk obligations (AI in products under EU product-safety law)	Coming, moved from 2 Aug 2027	Agents embedded in regulated products
2 Aug 2030	High-risk systems used by public authorities that were already on the market	Coming	Public-sector deployments

Two notes on that table:

• The Omnibus moved dates, not requirements. The substance of the high-risk obligations (risk management, data governance, logging, documentation, human oversight, accuracy and robustness) is unchanged. The engineering lead time is the same, so you just have a later deadline to hit with it.
• GPAI models placed on the market before 2 August 2025 have until 2 August 2027 to comply. That’s the model provider’s problem, but it explains why some providers’ documentation is still filling in.

Where an agent fits

The AI Act doesn’t define “agent.” It regulates AI systems by what they are used for, and almost every agent is an AI system. Three questions place yours.

1. What’s your role? If you build an agent and put it into service under your name, you are usually its provider. That’s true even when it runs on someone else’s foundation model, which makes you a downstream provider of that model. If you use a third-party agent in your business, you are a deployer. Many organizations are both, for different systems. The Omnibus also gives the Commission’s AI Office exclusive supervision of AI systems built on a GPAI model by the same provider. If you’re a model lab shipping your own agent, that changes who your supervisor is.

2. Does it talk to people? Then Article 50 applies now. Providers of AI systems intended to interact directly with people must design them so people are informed they’re dealing with an AI system, unless that’s obvious from context, at the latest at the first interaction. Generated synthetic audio, image, video or text must be marked in a machine-readable way. Deployers have separate disclosure duties for deepfakes and for AI-generated text published to inform the public. For most customer-facing agents (chat, voice, email replies) this is the obligation that already bites.

3. Does it support a decision listed in Annex III? Examples include creditworthiness assessment and credit scoring of individuals (fraud detection is carved out), risk assessment and pricing for life and health insurance, recruitment and candidate screening, and decisions on promotion, termination or task allocation at work. If so, it’s likely high-risk from 2 December 2027. Article 6(3) offers a way out for systems that don’t pose a significant risk, for example ones that perform a narrow procedural task, improve the result of a completed human activity, or do preparatory work for a human assessment. But a system that profiles individuals is always high-risk, and you must document the assessment either way.

The same agent platform can host both kinds of use. A customer-service agent that answers balance questions is an Art. 50 system. Give the same agent a tool that pre-scores hardship applications and that use case may be Annex III. Classify per use case, not per platform.

What high-risk will ask of an agent

You have until December 2027 for Annex III systems. Here’s what that buys, and why to start now:

Requirement	Article	What it means for an agent	Where to start
Risk management system	9	A living risk register covering misuse, injection and tool failure	Threat model
Data and data governance	10	Provenance and quality of retrieval corpora, memory and any fine-tuning data	Memory patterns
Technical documentation	11	Architecture, tools, model versions, evaluation results	Your agent inventory record
Record-keeping (logging)	12	Automatic event logs across the system’s lifetime	Observability
Transparency to deployers	13	Instructions for use, limits, expected accuracy	Your runbook
Human oversight	14	Effective oversight, including the ability to stop the system	HITL patterns
Accuracy, robustness, cybersecurity	15	Evaluated performance, resilience to manipulation	Evaluation, supply chain

Deployers of high-risk systems carry their own duties under Article 26, including assigning human oversight to competent people and keeping the logs under their control for at least six months.

What to do this quarter

A checklist for Q4 2026, in rough priority order:

• Art. 50 disclosure audit. List every agent that talks to people (chat widgets, voice bots, auto-replies, outbound email). Confirm each one tells people it’s AI at the first interaction. This applies now.
• Generated-content marking. If an agent produces synthetic images, audio, video or text, check your machine-readable marking. Systems on the market before 2 August 2026 have until 2 December 2026.
• Prohibited-practice screen. Re-check every use case against Art. 5, including the new December 2026 ban if anything you run generates images.
• Inventory and classify per use case. For each one, record your role (provider or deployer), whether Annex III applies, and your Art. 6(3) reasoning. The SR 26-2 framework inventory works for both regimes.
• Get your model providers’ documentation. GPAI providers must give downstream providers information to understand the model’s capabilities and limits. Ask for it and file it.
• AI literacy. Article 4 has applied since February 2025. The Omnibus softened its wording, so check the consolidated text, but keep a record of the training given to the people who build, run and oversee agents.
• Start high-risk engineering now for any Annex III use case: trajectory logging, a designed human-oversight pattern and an evaluation suite take quarters to build properly, not weeks.
• Watch for implementation guidance. Harmonised standards and Commission guidelines will shape what “compliant” means for high-risk systems. Assign someone to track them.

Common questions

Did the Omnibus delay everything? No. Prohibitions, AI literacy, GPAI obligations and Art. 50 transparency all kept their dates. Only the high-risk obligations moved, plus a few targeted additions.

Is every agent high-risk? No. Most agents are not. Classification follows the use case. An internal coding agent or a document-summarizing agent normally isn’t in Annex III. An agent that ranks job applicants or helps decide credit for individuals likely is.

We only use a third-party model through an API. Are we off the hook? Not for your own system. GPAI obligations sit with the model provider, but if you build an agent on that model and offer it under your name, the system-level obligations (Art. 50 now, high-risk later if it applies) are yours.