EU AI Act
The EU AI Act is the European Union's 2024 regulation that classifies AI systems by risk and sets obligations for providers and deployers — the first comprehensive AI law in the world.
Definition
The EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) is the European Union's horizontal regulation on artificial intelligence. It entered into force on 1 August 2024 and applies in phases. Prohibitions and AI-literacy provisions applied from 2 February 2025, governance and general-purpose AI provisions from 2 August 2025, and most provisions apply from 2 August 2026. Following the EU's 2026 simplification changes, some high-risk rules apply later. The Act prohibits certain practices, regulates high-risk systems, and sets transparency duties for specific AI systems and generated content.
Why it matters
The EU AI Act is the first comprehensive AI law in any major economy. It applies extraterritorially: any AI system placed on the EU market, or whose output is used in the EU, must comply regardless of where the provider is established. Penalties reach up to EUR 35 million or 7% of worldwide annual turnover. For enterprises this means AI procurement must now include AI Act risk classification and provider-obligation verification.
How Volentis.ai handles it
Volentis.ai is designed for source-grounded knowledge-assistant use cases with transparency, source attribution, and audit trails. EU AI Act classification should be confirmed per customer use case and deployment context. Public copy states that customer data is not used to train foundation models.