⚡ Quick Summary
Published by the international law firm Bird & Bird, this guide to the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) is dated 7 April 2025 and runs to ten chapters covering scope, prohibited practices, high-risk systems, general-purpose AI models, transparency, regulatory sandboxes, enforcement and governance, and the secondary legislation still to come. Its purpose is to map the Regulation's obligations onto the actors who carry them - providers, deployers, importers, distributors, product manufacturers and authorised representatives - and to set out when each provision applies.
The guide explains the Act's risk-based classification into unacceptable, high, limited and minimal risk, and the two routes to high-risk status under article 6 (Annex I product safety legislation and Annex III use cases), including the article 6(3) exemptions for narrow procedural tasks, improvements to completed human work, detection of decision-making patterns and preparatory tasks. It sets out the article 5 prohibitions, the article 50 transparency duties, and the article 53 and 55 obligations for general-purpose AI models, including the threshold of more than 10^25 floating point operations that presumes systemic risk. Enforcement is described through post-market monitoring, serious-incident reporting deadlines, market surveillance authorities, the AI Office, and fines of up to €35,000,000 or 7% of worldwide annual turnover.
🧩 What’s Covered
Chapters track the structure of the Regulation.
- Overview, key concepts and timing (Chapter 1): the risk-based approach, the article 3(1) definition of an AI system and its ability to infer, the four risk levels, supply-chain roles, governance bodies, the staggered application dates through to 31 December 2030, and fine bands up to €35,000,000 or 7% of worldwide turnover.
- Material and territorial scope (Chapter 2): the six operator categories, the concepts of making available, placing on the market and putting into service, article 25(4) supplier agreements, the article 86 right to explanation, exclusions for military and national security uses, and the trigger where an AI system's output is used in the EU.
- Prohibited AI practices (Chapter 3): the eight article 5 prohibitions and their exceptions, the annual reassessment under article 112, and enforcement that is operator-agnostic.
- High-risk AI systems (Chapter 4): Annex I and Annex III categories, the article 6(3) exemptions, provider requirements in articles 8 to 15, deployer duties including the fundamental rights impact assessment, importer, distributor and supplier obligations, and conformity assessment.
- General-purpose AI models (Chapter 5): the article 3(63) definition, article 53 obligations such as the copyright policy and the training-data summary, and systemic-risk rules including the 10^25 floating point operations presumption.
- Transparency obligations (Chapter 6): article 50 duties for chatbots, marking of synthetic content, emotion recognition and biometric categorisation, and deepfake labelling, with marking methods and exemptions.
- Sandboxes, enforcement and what comes next (Chapters 7 to 9): AI regulatory sandboxes and real-world testing, post-market monitoring and incident reporting deadlines, market surveillance powers, the AI Office, Board, Advisory Forum and scientific panel, and the delegated acts, guidelines, codes and standards still to be adopted.
💡 Why it matters?
Organisations that place AI on the EU market, or whose AI output is used in the EU, need to know which role they occupy and which articles bind them. The guide converts the Regulation into an operational map: each obligation is paired with its article number, penalties are given by infringement type, and each chapter closes with to-do items for providers, deployers and suppliers. It also shows where the AI Act sits alongside the GDPR, the Digital Services Act and the New Legislative Framework, and which harmonised standards and codes of practice will carry the practical detail.
❓ What’s Missing
The guide summarises the Regulation rather than replacing it, and several practical questions remain open in its own account. It records that there are no definitive guidelines on the scope of information to be provided for emotion recognition and biometric categorisation systems, and none on how AI-generated content should be labelled, both of which are expected in future codes of practice. The Commission's article 6 examples, the post-market monitoring template and the harmonised standards were still pending when the guide was written, and the delegated and implementing acts listed in Chapter 9 carry no fixed adoption dates. The treatment is confined to the EU framework.
👥 Best For
Legal, compliance and regulatory affairs teams scoping their role under the AI Act; providers and deployers of high-risk systems preparing conformity assessments, technical documentation and fundamental rights impact assessments; suppliers and downstream providers negotiating article 25 agreements; and governance leads building post-market monitoring and serious-incident reporting procedures.
📄 Source Details
European Union Artificial Intelligence Act: a guide, published by Bird & Bird, dated 7 April 2025, 76 pages, English. The "AI Guide Contributors" page lists the firm's named contributors across Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and the closing notice states that Bird & Bird owns the copyright in the document. No series or reference number and no URL for the guide itself are printed. The input was the text extraction of all 76 pages.
