The EU AI Act's high-risk obligations were deferred six days before they would have applied — Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 moves Annex III systems to 2 December 2027 and Annex I to 2 August 2028, and the Commission's own Article 113 page still shows the old text

A compliance function that read the AI Act's headline application date and diarised 2 August 2026 got the right date and the wrong obligation set. Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, the "Digital Omnibus on AI," was published in the Official Journal on 24 July 2026 and entered into force on 27 July, six days before that date, and it rewrites the carve-outs that determine what actually applies.

The amendment is surgical, which is the reason it is easy to misread. It replaces points inside Article 113's third paragraph and leaves the second paragraph — "It shall apply from 2 August 2026" (EUR-Lex, 2024-07-12) — untouched as text, so a reader who stops at that sentence concludes nothing has changed. What changed sits one paragraph below: the amended point now provides that "Chapter III, Sections 1, 2, and 3, with the exception of Article 6(5), shall apply from: (i) 2 December 2027 as regards AI systems classified as high-risk pursuant to Article 6(2) and Annex III; and (ii) 2 August 2028 as regards AI systems classified as high-risk pursuant to Article 6(1) and Annex I" (EUR-Lex, 2026-07-24). Annex III is the standalone high-risk list that covers biometrics, employment, education, migration, access to essential services and law enforcement — categories that map directly onto public-administration systems — and those obligations were due on the general date. They are now sixteen months further out. Annex I high-risk systems, embedded as safety components in products already regulated under EU product law, move from 2 August 2027 to 2 August 2028.

Two smaller changes run the other way. A new point provides that "Articles 102 to 110 shall apply from 27 July 2026" — the AI Act's own amendments to sectoral product legislation take effect immediately on the omnibus's entry into force rather than waiting for a later date. And the omnibus inserts two further prohibited practices into Article 5(1), which apply from 2 December 2026 rather than from the February 2025 date that governs the rest of Chapters I and II.

The secondary observation is operationally relevant to anyone whose compliance tooling reads from official web sources rather than from the Official Journal. The European Commission's own AI Act Service Desk explorer page for Article 113, fetched during this run, still displayed the pre-amendment text with the old three-point structure (European Commission — AI Act Service Desk, checked 2026-08-09), sixteen days after the Commission published the amending regulation. No consolidated version reflecting the amendment was available on EUR-Lex either. Any downstream tool, tracker or advisory that sources its dates from those pages is currently serving a timetable that the law has superseded.