August 2 and the arrival of real AI regulation — a year of obligations without a regulator ends this week
The AI Act's general-purpose model obligations have been law since August 2025. For twelve months no one could enforce them. That gap closes on 2 August, and the interesting question is not what the rules say but what a year of unenforceable compliance did to how seriously anyone took them.
There is a particular kind of law that exists but cannot bite, and it teaches everyone the wrong lesson while it lasts. The European Commission gains the power to enforce the AI Act against general-purpose model providers on 2 August — one year to the day after the obligations themselves took effect. For that year, compliance was a matter of conscience.
What a year of unenforceable law does
It sorts firms into two groups. The ones who built compliance because the obligation existed, and the ones who waited to see whether anyone would come. Both groups now face the same regulator, but they arrive with very different amounts of work behind them, and the second group has been accumulating exposure the whole time — the obligations were never suspended, only unenforced.
The instinct will be to treat 2 August as a start date. It is not. It is the date on which a year of accumulated position becomes actionable.
The carve-out is narrower than the shorthand
Open-weight providers are excused from two of four core obligations — technical documentation and downstream-provider information. They still owe a copyright compliance policy and a published training-data summary. That second item is the one that bites, because it is precisely the disclosure the entire field has been least willing to make. Kimi K3 landing as a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight release two weeks before enforcement is a live test of whether the carve-out is workable as drafted.
What to watch
The first enforcement action will define the practical scope far more than the text does. France's competition authority documenting 84% market concentration in the same window gives a regulator somewhere obvious to look. Concentration findings do not create obligations, but they shape discretion — and discretion is what a regulator with new powers has most of.
A law nobody could enforce taught the market that the deadline was the thing to watch. The lesson of the next quarter will be that the obligation was.
ComplexDiscovery — Open weights, open questions: the letter that redrew the AI policy fight → · International Center for Law & Economics — Open Models, Closed Minds: AI Policy Keeps Regulating the Wrong Thing →