Preliminary pledges
The February 2 deadline is in some ways a formality.
Last September, over 100 companies signed the EU AI Pact, a voluntary pledge to start applying the principles of the AI Act ahead of its entry into application. As part of the Pact, signatories — which included Amazon, Google, and OpenAI — committed to identifying AI systems likely to be categorized as high risk under the AI Act.
Some tech giants, notably Meta and Apple, skipped the Pact. French AI startup Mistral, one of the AI Act’s harshest critics, also opted not to sign.