EU AI Act trilogue stalls overnight — August compliance date back in play
TL;DR: Trilogue negotiations on the Digital Omnibus on AI broke down in the early hours of 29 April after 12 hours of talks, IAPP reports. The Cypriot presidency confirmed agreement could not be reached with the European Parliament. Talks resume in roughly two weeks; if no deal lands before August, the AI Act’s original 2 August 2026 compliance deadline for Annex III high-risk systems comes back into force.
The Omnibus would have postponed Annex III high-risk obligations to 2 December 2027 and Annex I (AI embedded in regulated products such as medical devices) to 2 August 2028. The fault line, MLex reports, was the Parliament’s push to move sectoral legislation from Annex I Section A to B — a procedural shift the Council resisted. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has publicly backed easing industrial-AI restrictions, with Siemens calling for an end to “double regulation”.
What this means in practice
Italian MEP Brando Benifei warned that a wholesale sectoral shift would “fragment the AI Act’s horizontal framework into twelve separate compliance logics”. Dutch MEP Kim van Sparrentak told Reuters: “Big Tech is probably popping champagne. While European companies that care about safety and did their homework now face regulatory chaos.” Digital Europe estimated up to €31 billion in compliance costs were on the table in the simplification debate.
For UK firms, the stalled negotiation is more material than the headline suggests. UK companies placing AI on the EU market — including most enterprise SaaS, financial-services platforms and AI-enabled medical devices — fall under the Act’s territorial scope. The Omnibus delay was the load-bearing assumption in many UK firms’ compliance roadmaps, which would have mapped to a December 2027 substantive deadline rather than August 2026.
Looking forward
If the next round of talks fails again, UK boards have roughly three months to confirm Annex III conformity-assessment readiness — risk management, data governance, technical documentation, post-market monitoring — for any high-risk system already in the EU market or scheduled for launch. The asymmetry hurts: divergence from the EU on AI governance has so far been a competitive question for the UK; an unaltered August 2026 Annex III deadline turns it into an immediate compliance squeeze. Expect City lawyers to flag this in board papers within the week, alongside FCA Senior Managers Regime obligations on accountable executives.