The timing to internalize: the EU's Digital Omnibus package moved the Annex III high-risk regime - the full conformity-assessment weight, the CE-style obligations, the enforcement teeth - to December 2027. From August 2026, that is 16 months of runway. But the deferral is not a reprieve, because the other obligations did not move: the Article 5 prohibited-practices ban and the Article 50 transparency duties, and the GPAI obligations, went live on August 2, 2026 - which is past, not future, as of this writing. The runway is for the heavy regime. The light regime is already law, and the 16 months are for the work that the heavy regime requires, which is the work that cannot be crammed into a quarter.
The pacing plan is the read of that shape: what is live now, what is deferred, and what the deferral implies about how the 16 months should be spent.
What is already live, and what the "live" means
The August 2, 2026 line put three things in force, and the three are the work that is not runway-dependent:
- The Article 5 prohibited practices. The banned-category list (the social-scoring class, the manipulative-application class, the untargeted facial-image scraping class, the most of the emotion-inference-in-workplace class). These are not "comply-by-December-2027" items. They are stop-now items, and the enforcement is not waiting for the heavy regime. The read: if your product touches a prohibited category, the 16 months are not a runway, they are a countdown on an item that is already actionable.
- The Article 50 transparency duties. The AI-interaction disclosure (the "you are talking to an AI" duty), the synthetic-content marking, the deepfake disclosure. These are the items a product ships with, and they are live, which means the shipped product that does not carry the disclosure is non-compliant now, not in December.
- The GPAI obligations. The systemic-risk provider duties, the downstream-provider documentation duties, the copyright-policy duty. For a gateway buyer, the GPAI line is the one that changes the vendor relationship: the provider's documentation (the model card, the training-data summary, the compliance posture) is now a compliance input to your file, and the item to collect is per-provider, current, and dated.
What the 16 months are for: the Annex III work
The deferred regime is the high-risk conformity work, and the 16 months are the window for the four workstreams that the regime requires and that cannot be parallel-compressed:
- The use-case classification. Which of your deployments, if any, sit in an Annex III high-risk category (the employment-decision class, the creditworthiness class, the educational-assessment class, the critical-infrastructure class). The classification is the gating question, because the workstream is scoped by the answer, and the answer is a legal determination, not an engineering one. The 16 months start with the classification, and the classification should be done in the first quarter of the runway, not the last.
- The risk-management file. The Annex III workstream that is the actual heavy object: the risk-management system, the data-governance record, the technical documentation, the logging duty, the human-oversight design. The file is a product artifact, and the artifact is built against the model, the prompt, the routing, and the human-in-the-loop design - which means it is built against the stack, and the routing checklist is the layer of the file that the engineering team owns.
- The model-supply documentation. The GPAI-line documentation, collected per provider, is an input to the Annex III file, and the 16 months are long enough to build the supplier-documentation pipeline (the per-provider model card, the training summary, the compliance posture, dated and versioned) that the file requires. The pipeline is the build, and the file is the product.
- The conformity assessment, itself. The self-assessment (most Annex III categories) or the third-party assessment (the higher-risk subset) is the terminal step, and it is the one that cannot start until the file is a state it can be assessed against. The runway's last quarter is the assessment window, and the 16 months are the 15 months of file before it.
The pacing, staged
The runway, spent in the shape the deferral implies:
- Now through Q1 2027 (the classification quarter): the prohibited-practices check (the stop-now items), the Article 50 disclosure state of the shipped product, and the Annex III use-case classification, per deployment. The output is the scope: which deployments are in the heavy regime, and the file's size.
- Q2 2027 through Q3 2027 (the file quarters): the risk-management file, the data-governance record, the technical documentation, the logging, the human-oversight design - built against the routing layer, with the routing checklist as the engineering-side artifact. The supplier-documentation pipeline runs in parallel, per provider.
- Q4 2027 (the assessment quarter): the conformity assessment, against the file, with the December 2027 line as the deadline the assessment is sized to.
The pacing is the deferral's intent: the 16 months are a build window for the file, not a grace period for the light regime, and the light regime's "now" is the reason the classification quarter starts immediately, because the classification is the answer to "which of my deployments is already in scope for the stop-now items."
What to do
- Run the prohibited-practices check this quarter, against the shipped product, not the roadmap - the Article 5 items are live, and the check is a stop-now determination, not a runway item.
- Confirm the Article 50 disclosure state of every shipped surface (the AI-interaction duty, the synthetic-content marking), and close the gap now, because the disclosure is live and the gap is current non-compliance.
- Start the Annex III classification in the first quarter of the runway, per deployment, with the legal determination as the output - the classification scopes the file, and the file is the 15 months of work the runway is for.
- Build the per-provider documentation pipeline over the file quarters, so the supplier line is a dated, versioned artifact by the assessment quarter, and the routing checklist is the engineering artifact the file cites.