Where the AI Act Digital Omnibus stands, and how it got there
The Digital Omnibus on AI was signed on 8 July 2026 and, as at 22 July 2026, has still not appeared in the Official Journal. It enters into force on the third day after publication. That leaves the amendment in an awkward but perfectly workable state: politically final, legally pending. The consolidated instrument on EUR-Lex is still Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 in its original form, and the Regulation (EU) 2026 number everyone will eventually cite does not yet exist in authoritative shape.
The route it took matters, because the text changed materially along the way and a note written from the Commission proposal is now wrong in at least one important place.
Until publication, the strictly correct citation is Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 as amended by the Digital Omnibus on AI, with a visible review date. Nobody is well served by planning to the original dates on the theory that the amendment is not formally in force yet: both co-legislators have voted, and the amended dates are the ones your regulator will work from. If you want the whole schedule in one place, the full application timeline as amended sets out each date and what it obliges.
Change one: the AI Act delay that turned one date into four
The original design put an enormous amount of the regulation on a single day. The Omnibus took that day apart. Article 50 transparency stayed exactly where it was. The machine-readable marking duty in Article 50(2) got a grace period for systems already on the market. The high-risk regime moved by more than a year for standalone Annex III systems, and the Omnibus sets 2 August 2028 for AI embedded in Annex I products.
| Date | What applies | Status under the Omnibus | Who it binds |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 Feb 2025 | Article 5 prohibitions (a) to (h); Article 4 AI-literacy duty | Unchanged | Providers and deployers |
| 2 Aug 2025 | GPAI model obligations; governance provisions; penalties | Unchanged | GPAI model providers; member states |
| 2 Aug 2026 | Article 50(1), 50(3) and 50(4) transparency; Article 50(2) marking for generative systems placed on the market from this date; AI Office enforcement begins | Unchanged | Providers for 50(1) and 50(2); deployers for 50(3) and 50(4) |
| 2 Dec 2026 | Article 50(2) marking for generative systems placed on the market before 2 Aug 2026; the ninth prohibition | New date created by the Omnibus | Providers; and deployers for the prohibition |
| 2 Dec 2027 | High-risk obligations for standalone Annex III systems | Moved from 2 Aug 2026, a seventeen-month extension | Providers, deployers, importers, distributors |
| 2 Aug 2028 | High-risk obligations for Annex I embedded-product systems | Set by the Omnibus | Product manufacturers and providers |
The half-truth that costs money. The headline that AI Act deadlines were delayed is true of the high-risk regime and false of everything landing on 2 August 2026. Chatbot disclosure under Art 50(1), emotion and biometric notice under Art 50(3) and deepfake and public-interest text disclosure under Art 50(4) bite on that day, for a population far wider than the high-risk one. If your programme stood down on the delay headline, start with what actually applies on 2 August 2026.
The grace period, and why you should quote the date and not the month count
Article 50(2) requires providers of systems generating synthetic audio, image, video or text to mark those outputs in a machine-readable format. Systems placed on the market from 2 August 2026 comply from the moment of placement. Systems already on the market before that day get until 2 December 2026. Sources describe the length of that window inconsistently, some calling it three months and some four, because one tracks the negotiating framing and the other counts the calendar span. Every source agrees on the date. Put 2 December 2026 in your calendar and never a month count, and the discrepancy stops mattering. The duty-by-duty breakdown sits on the Article 50 transparency page.
Change two: a ninth Article 5 prohibition on CSAM and intimate imagery
Article 5 carried eight prohibitions, clarified by Commission guidelines in February 2025 and applicable since 2 February 2025: manipulative or deceptive techniques, exploitation of vulnerability, social scoring, individual predictive criminal-risk assessment based solely on profiling, untargeted facial scraping, emotion recognition at work and in education, biometric categorisation inferring sensitive traits, and real-time remote biometric identification in public spaces for law enforcement.
The Omnibus adds a ninth: AI systems that generate child sexual abuse material, or images, video or audio depicting an identifiable person in an intimate or sexually explicit way without consent. The so-called nudifier tools are the obvious target, but the drafting is not limited to them. Law-firm analysis of the agreed text reads the provider test as extending to any system where such generation is a reasonably foreseeable and reproducible outcome, without requiring significant technical modification. Providers may not place such systems on the market without adequate technical safeguards, and the prohibition binds deployers too.
Two features make this different from the other eight. First, it is the only prohibition with a future compliance date: 2 December 2026, not 2 February 2025. Second, it lands in the top enforcement tier, because breaches of Article 5 attract €35M or 7% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher for a company and whichever is lower for an SME or start-up under Article 99(6). The penalties and enforcement breakdown sets out how the three tiers divide.
Foreseeable output, not intended purpose. If you provide a general-purpose image or video generator, the question is not whether you built it for this. It is whether a user can get there without significant technical modification. That makes safeguard testing, red-teaming and refusal behaviour a compliance artefact with a deadline attached, not a trust-and-safety nice-to-have.
Change three: the Machinery Regulation carve-out for embedded AI
A system reaches high-risk status by two routes. The Annex III route lists eight use areas: biometrics, critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment and worker management, access to essential private and public services including credit scoring and health and life insurance pricing, law enforcement, migration and border control, and the administration of justice and democratic processes. The Annex I route is different in kind: the AI is a safety component of, or is itself, a product already covered by EU harmonisation legislation that requires third-party conformity assessment.
The Omnibus gives AI embedded in Machinery Regulation products a targeted carve-out from the direct high-risk rules of the AI Act, with the AI-specific requirements layered into the Machinery Regulation instead. Read that as a change of route rather than an exemption. A machinery maker still has to satisfy AI-specific requirements; it does so inside the conformity assessment it was already running, rather than through a second, parallel AI Act process.
The carve-out is narrow and does not travel. Medical devices and toys with AI safety components remain fully inside the AI Act high-risk regime, on the 2 August 2028 date. Nothing about the Annex III route changed. If you are unsure which route your system takes, the guide to what counts as a high-risk AI system walks both tests in order.
Change four: the database registration the Commission proposed to drop
This is the change most likely to be wrong in your notes, because the proposal and the adopted text point in opposite directions.
Background: under Article 6(3), an Annex III system is not high-risk if it does not pose a significant risk of harm to health, safety or fundamental rights, including by not materially influencing the outcome of decision making, and it meets at least one of four conditions. Those are a narrow procedural task, improving the result of a previously completed human activity, detecting decision-making patterns or deviations without replacing or influencing the prior human assessment absent proper review, or performing a preparatory task to an assessment relevant to an Annex III use case. A system that performs profiling of natural persons is always high-risk, with no exceptions. Article 6(4) then requires the provider to document that assessment before the system is placed on the market.
The Commission proposal would have removed the obligation to register systems self-assessed as not high-risk in the EU database. That deletion did not survive negotiations. Registration was reinstated, in a simplified and lighter form. So the derogation remains a documented, filed position rather than a quiet internal decision: you write the Article 6(4) assessment before placement, and you register.
No worked examples to lean on. The Commission missed its statutory February 2026 deadline for the Article 6 high-risk classification guidelines, so authoritative examples of a successful derogation are scarce. Until they arrive, the conservative posture is the only defensible one: document thoroughly, register, and assume profiling forecloses the off-ramp entirely. The Article 6(3) derogation page covers where the test gets over-claimed, and the free triage classifier runs the four conditions and the profiling override against your own system.
What this EU AI Act amendment did not change
An amendment marketed as simplification invites the assumption that everything got lighter. It did not. The Omnibus moved dates, added one prohibition, rerouted one product family and simplified one filing. The architecture of the regulation is untouched, and so are the obligations that have been enforceable since 2 August 2025.
| Provision | Position after the Digital Omnibus |
|---|---|
| Article 5 prohibitions (a) to (h) | In force since 2 February 2025, wording untouched |
| Article 4 AI-literacy duty | In force since 2 February 2025 |
| Article 99 penalty tiers | €35M or 7%, €15M or 3%, €7.5M or 1%; enforceable since 2 August 2025 |
| Article 6(3) derogation | Same four conditions, same absolute profiling override |
| Article 6(4) documentation | Assessment still documented before market placement |
| Article 25 role flip | Same three triggers, same full Article 16 consequence |
| GPAI duties, Articles 53 and 55 | Applying since 2 August 2025; 10^23 and 10^25 FLOP thresholds unchanged |
| Article 2 exclusions | Military, pre-placement R&D, personal use, open source with carve-outs |
| Annex III use areas | The same eight areas; only the application date moved |
| Annex IV technical documentation | The same nine blocks; the deadline moved with the high-risk regime |
Two consequences worth stating plainly. Penalties did not move, so an Article 5 breach today is enforceable today. And the seventeen months added to the standalone Annex III date buy engineering time, not documentation relief: the Annex IV blocks, the Article 9 risk management system and the conformity assessment all still have to exist before placement, and the volume of work is the same as it was.
What happens at Official Journal publication, and what to re-check
On publication the amendment gets its Regulation (EU) 2026 number and a publication date, enters into force on the third day after, and the consolidated version of the AI Act on EUR-Lex is updated to carry the amended text. Watch the instrument page on EUR-Lex and the Commission AI regulatory framework pages, and the European Parliament site if you need the procedural history for a file.
Five things to re-check that day, in order of how much rework they cause:
- The regulation number and publication date. Every compliance record citing the amendment needs a real instrument to point at. Replace the placeholder wording in your policies and self-assessment templates.
- The consolidated Article 113 dates. Read them against the four dates you planned to. They should match, but a plan built on a press summary rather than the operative text deserves a check against the text.
- The operative wording of the ninth prohibition and its transitional provision. If you provide a generative image, video or audio system, this is the paragraph your safeguard testing will be measured against on 2 December 2026.
- The simplified registration article. The obligation survived; what a simplified entry actually requires is the detail to confirm, especially if you are carrying self-assessed non-high-risk Annex III systems.
- Renumbering. Amending regulations move recitals and occasionally article references. Anything in your internal documentation that quotes a recital number needs a pass.
None of that changes what you should be building now. The nearest binding date is 2 August 2026 and it did not move, the ninth prohibition follows on 2 December 2026, and the high-risk work merely has a longer runway. If you have not yet established which of those actually reach your system, run the seven-stage triage and start from the answer.