The EU AI Act for Non-Lawyers

The AI Act is not a set of rules about AI, it is a set of rules assigned to roles, and the same system produces different duties depending on whether you built it or bought it. This cursus works through it without legal training: what counts as an AI system, the provider and deployer roles and the ordinary acts that switch you between them, the four risk tiers and the timeline as amended by the 2026 Digital Omnibus, and a proportionate path for an organisation without a legal department, including the SME simplifications and when a question genuinely needs a lawyer.