EU AI Act

The European Union Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is the EU regulation governing AI systems by risk level, in force since 1 August 2024. As a regulation it applies directly; member states need not pass separate laws.

Risk Classes

• Prohibited practices: Practices posing unacceptable risk, such as systems manipulating people, social scoring and certain biometric identification uses.
• High-risk systems: Systems used in recruitment, credit assessment, education, critical infrastructure and law enforcement; subject to strict obligations such as risk management, data quality, record-keeping, human oversight and conformity assessment.
• Transparency obligations: Rules such as chatbots informing users they are talking to AI and disclosing that deepfake content is artificially generated.
• General-purpose AI models: Technical documentation, copyright policy and transparency obligations for providers of large language models.

Timeline

• 2 February 2025: Prohibited practices and AI literacy obligation,
• 2 August 2025: Rules on general-purpose AI models,
• 2 August 2026: Transparency obligations (Article 50),
• Rules on high-risk systems were postponed by an amendment adopted in 2026: 2 December 2027 for stand-alone high-risk systems and 2 August 2028 for systems embedded in regulated products.

Impact on Turkish Companies

The Act also applies to non-EU companies placing AI systems on the EU market or whose AI output is used in the EU. Turkish companies selling software to EU customers, producing content for the EU market or using AI in recruitment for an EU group company may be in scope. For AI applications based on personal data, the GDPR and automated decision-making rules also apply.