The EU AI Act Actually Changed Something. Sort Of.
A year in, the most hated regulation in tech did a few things nobody predicted, and skipped the things everyone feared.
The EU AI Act was supposed to kill European AI innovation, according to half the people online. A year in, European AI is not dead. It is just more paperwork.
What actually changed is documentation. High-risk systems now need a paper trail a regulator can read. That is boring and it is also the entire point.
The fear was that small startups would drown in compliance. Some did stall. But a funny thing happened: the compliant ones started winning enterprise deals because procurement teams needed the paperwork anyway.
What did not happen is the great exodus. Companies complained and then hired a person whose job is "AI Act." That is most of regulation, if you think about it.
Whether it protects anyone is still an open question. But "sort of" is more than most people predicted, and less than the optimists hoped.