Enforcement day: the EU AI Office's power to compel and fine general-purpose model providers becomes applicable on August 2
As of today, 2 August 2026, the European Commission's enforcement machinery over general-purpose AI providers enters into application. The AI Office can move from persuasion to compulsion — requesting documentation, evaluating models directly, ordering corrective measures, restricting or withdrawing models from the EU market, and imposing fines of up to 3% of global annual turnover or €15 million under Article 101. The obligations were law a year ago; the regulator that can act on them arrives now.
The substantive event is the switch from a written rule to an actionable one. The GPAI obligations applied from 2 August 2025, but for twelve months the supervision-and-penalty apparatus was deliberately held back to let providers and the AI Office operationalise. That grace period ends today, and with it the asymmetry in which the rules were live while the enforcer was not.
What the AI Office gains is a full toolkit, not a warning letter. It can request the technical documentation and training-data summaries the Act requires, evaluate models on its own terms, order corrective measures, and — at the far end — restrict or pull a model from the EU market. The €15M-or-3% ceiling is the number that concentrates attention, but the market-withdrawal power is the one that changes how a provider weighs a non-compliant shipment.
For anyone selling model access into Europe, the practical read is that compliance stops being a roadmap slide today. The transparency duties — disclosing synthetic media and machine interlocutors — and the training-data-summary requirement now carry a named regulator and a live penalty, and vendor questionnaires across the EU market will grow a compliance field within the quarter.
AI Act Service Desk (European Commission) — Enforcement of Chapter V under the AI Act — FAQ → · Beam.ai — EU AI Act 2026: GPAI enforcement and 3% fines begin August 2 →