Three days to 2 August: what will and will not happen
The general-purpose AI obligations take effect on Saturday. Based on what happened in February, here is a realistic forecast.
On Saturday 2 August 2025 the EU AI Act’s obligations for providers of general-purpose AI models take effect. If February is any guide, Monday will be uneventful, and that is worth predicting out loud so nobody draws the wrong conclusion from it.
What will happen
Model providers serving the EU market begin publishing model documentation, training-data summaries and copyright policies, in most cases by signing the Code of Practice published on 10 July.
Some of that material will appear on provider websites within days. Some will take months. Enforcement provisions phase in later, so the practical pressure in August is reputational rather than legal.
What will not happen
Nothing will arrive at your office. No authority will write to a Swiss SME using AI. No product you use will stop working. No registration will be required of you.
The same was true on 3 February, and the same wrong conclusion was available then: that because nothing visible happened, none of it matters. What actually changed in February was that a question became askable, and your customers started asking it three months later.
What actually changes for you
One thing. From next week, « what is the model behind this trained on, and what are its documented limitations? » has an answer that exists in writing somewhere.
You will not need it in August. You will need it the first time a larger customer’s procurement department sends the questionnaire described on 9 May, and at that point the difference between a company that collected the answers and one that starts looking is about three weeks.
The whole action list for this week
- Chase any unanswered supplier emails from the 4 April post.
- Do the July review if you have not: refresh the tool list, one clarification, new date.
- Add the line from 25 July about which of your activity touches the EU market.
That is roughly forty minutes, and it closes this subject until the next milestone in August 2026 — which, as noted in June, will not touch most SMEs either.
Then take the summer properly. The automation cover conversation from 2 July matters more for the next four weeks than anything in this post.