Four months to 2 August. What the next AI Act deadline gives you as a buyer
The general-purpose AI obligations land in August. They are aimed at model providers, and for once that is good news for the people buying.
The next EU AI Act milestone is 2 August 2025, four months from today. It brings obligations for providers of general-purpose AI models — documentation, transparency about training data, copyright policy, and for the largest models, systemic risk assessment.
As in February, these obligations are not yours. You use models; you do not place them on the market. But this deadline is different from the last one, because it produces something you receive.
What arrives on your side of the table
Model providers serving the EU market will have to publish technical documentation and summaries of the data their models were trained on, and to state a copyright policy.
That material flows downstream. Your software vendor, who builds on one of these models, will have it. Which means that from August, a question that has had no good answer for three years acquires one: what is the model in this product trained on, and what are its documented limitations?
Why that matters more than it sounds
Three practical uses for a Swiss SME.
Answering your own customers. If a German client’s procurement asks what AI you use and on what basis, you will be able to point at documentation rather than a marketing page.
Copyright comfort. If you generate marketing text or images commercially, a documented copyright policy upstream is not a guarantee, but it is considerably better than the nothing you have today.
Comparing vendors honestly. Two products claiming the same capability will, for the first time, have comparable paperwork behind them.
The one thing to do before August
Send one email to each vendor whose product has an AI feature you rely on. Ask: which model provider sits behind this feature, and will you pass on their Article 53 documentation when it is published?
You are not asking them to do anything. You are finding out, cheaply and early, which of your suppliers knows what is in their own supply chain. The ones who answer in a day have thought about it. The ones who go quiet have told you something more useful than an answer would have.