A regulatory date worth keeping an eye on, with a catch attached.

On 7 May the EU institutions reached provisional agreement to push the main high-risk deadline in the AI Act from August this year out to December 2027. If you have been bracing for a summer scramble, that sounds like breathing room.

Here is the catch. It isn’t law yet.

Plan for August, expect December 2027

Until the change is formally adopted and published, the original date of 2 August 2026 stands as written. A provisional agreement is a signal of intent, not a new rule. Plenty can move between now and a final text.

So if you trade into the EU, the honest position is plain. Plan for August, expect December 2027, watch the next few weeks. Build as though the original deadline holds, because legally it still does, and treat the delay as a bonus if and when it lands. The businesses that get caught out are the ones that down tools the moment they read a favourable headline.

One part isn’t moving

While the high-risk timeline wobbles, one obligation is sitting completely still. The AI literacy duty has applied since February 2025, and none of these changes touch it.

In plain terms, your people need to understand the AI they use. Not at the level of a data scientist. At the level of knowing what a tool is good for, where it gets things wrong, what should never be pasted into it.

That is a policy question, not a tooling one. You cannot buy your way out of it with a better model. It is closer to AI training for business owners and their teams than anything you will find in a procurement catalogue, and it is the part most businesses have quietly skipped.

What to do this month

You don’t need a compliance department to make progress. You need three short answers written down.

  1. Where AI touches a customer or their data. A ten-minute map of every tool and where it sits.
  1. Who has had any AI training at all. If the honest answer is “nobody formally”, that is your literacy gap, and it is already in scope.
  1. What our one-page boundary is. What’s fine, what needs a check, what never goes near a model.

This is the same work whether the deadline is August 2026 or December 2027. The date moving doesn’t change what good looks like. It only changes how much time you have to get there.

We wrote in an earlier piece that the Act’s transparency rules were a 2 August problem most businesses hadn’t started on. That still holds. This week’s news is a reason to keep watching the timeline, not a reason to stop preparing.