The EU AI Act: enforcement, penalties, and the implementation timeline
Two of the most memorisation-friendly pieces of the EU AI Act: what violations cost, and when each part of the Act starts to apply. The exam tests both nearly verbatim.
Why this matters for the AIGP exam
Numbers-based questions are rare gifts on a scenario-heavy paper — if you know the three fine tiers and the phase-in order, these are direct points.
The essentials
- Three fine tiers, each "up to" the higher of a fixed sum or a share of global annual turnover: prohibited-practice violations, €35 million or 7%; most other obligations (including high-risk and GPAI duties), €15 million or 3%; supplying misleading information to authorities, €7.5 million or 1%.
- Proportionality for smaller firms. For SMEs and startups the applicable cap is the lower of the two amounts, not the higher.
- The timeline is phased — and was revised in 2026. The Act entered into force in August 2024; prohibitions and AI-literacy duties applied from February 2025, and GPAI rules with the penalty regime from August 2025. The original schedule put Annex III high-risk obligations at August 2026 and Annex I embedded-product high-risk at August 2027, but the EU's 2026 Digital Omnibus deferred those two to December 2027 and August 2028 respectively. Article 50 transparency duties kept their August 2026 date.
- Know both schedules. Body of Knowledge 2.1 predates the Omnibus, so study material and exam questions may still reflect the original dates; the deferral changed the high-risk application dates and nothing else about the obligations themselves.
- Enforcement is shared between national market-surveillance authorities and, for GPAI models, the Commission's AI Office.
What the exam asks
Match a violation to its fine tier, and put the phase-in dates in order — including which duties were already live before the high-risk regime arrived.
Going deeper
This page is the condensed version. The full topic — with the detail above expanded and practice questions attached — is in the app, inside Domain II. Domain I, a quarter of the course, is free to try first.
Back to the AIGP study guide.
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