The EU AI Act is the European Union's regulation governing artificial intelligence, classifying systems by risk tier and imposing obligations — including risk management, data governance, technical documentation, record-keeping, human oversight and transparency — that scale with that classification.
What is the EU AI Act?
The Act is significant because it converts governance principles into legal obligations with extraterritorial reach and defined penalties. For most enterprises the practical work concentrates on high-risk classification: maintaining an inventory of AI systems and their purposes, documenting the data used, keeping records that allow a decision to be reconstructed, and demonstrating meaningful human oversight. Those requirements are operational rather than declarative, which is why they depend on runtime evidence rather than policy documents.