- The EU AI Act becomes generally applicable on August 2, 2026, with key dates for prohibited practices, general-purpose AI obligations, and high-risk systems.
- High-risk AI systems in categories like hiring and credit scoring face obligations including classification, risk management, data governance, and documentation.
- Conformity engineering treats regulatory compliance as a system property, enforced through pipelines, rather than as a post-facto report.
- Key practices include versioned classification, continuous risk management via code, dataset lineage tracking, and generating technical documentation automatically.
- Obligations require audit logging, user instructions, human oversight features, accuracy testing, and post-market monitoring with incident reporting.
- Penalties for non-compliance can reach up to €35M or 7% of global turnover, similar to GDPR, prompting engineering involvement in compliance planning.
- Initial steps involve classifying the system, assessing gaps against a checklist, and addressing weaknesses through automated pipelines and evidence generation.