The final GPAI Code of Practice is out, three weeks before the deadline
Published on 10 July after three drafts and about a thousand contributors. For a Swiss SME it confirms what arrives, and what does not.
The European Commission published the final General-Purpose AI Code of Practice on 10 July 2025, in three chapters: transparency, copyright, and safety and security. It is voluntary, and signing it is how model providers demonstrate compliance with obligations that apply from 2 August.
This blog has covered each draft — November, December, and now the final text. The conclusion has not moved: you are not the addressee. What has firmed up is what you receive.
The chapter that reaches you
Transparency. Model providers serving the EU market will produce documentation about their models and summaries of training data. That material flows downstream to your software vendor and, when you ask, to you.
The copyright chapter matters for a narrower group: anyone generating material commercially. It sets out what providers commit to regarding lawfully obtained training data — which, after the two US rulings in June, is the question the courts have flagged as decisive.
The safety chapter applies only to the largest models with systemic risk. It is genuinely not about you.
What to do with three weeks left
If you sent the supplier email from 4 April, chase anything unanswered. If you did not, send it now — it is one paragraph and the answers are more useful before the deadline than after.
When documentation appears in August, file it with the page. You do not need to read it all; you need to be able to produce it when a customer’s procurement asks, which is the scenario from 9 May.
The honest summary of this whole thread
Nine months of this blog have covered five GPAI milestones. The net obligation created for a Swiss SME using AI is: nothing. The net benefit is: documentation that did not exist before now exists, and a question you could not previously get answered now has an answer.
That is a better outcome than the coverage suggested at any point along the way, and it is worth saying plainly, because a great deal of compliance product has been sold in the meantime on the opposite premise.