Chapter I · GENERAL PROVISIONS
Article 4 — AI literacy
▼ Primary text, verbatim. Our annotations appear below, visibly separated.
1. Providers and deployers of AI systems shall take measures to support the development of AI literacy of their staff and other persons dealing with the operation and use of AI systems on their behalf, taking into account their technical knowledge, experience, education and training and the context the AI systems are to be used in, and considering the persons or groups of persons on whom the AI systems are to be used. This obligation does not require providers or deployers to guarantee any specific level of AI literacy of any individual.
2. The Commission and the Member States shall support and facilitate the efforts of providers and deployers of AI systems, in particular SMEs, in fulfilling their obligation under paragraph 1 of this Article. For that purpose, the Commission shall publish practical examples of how to comply with that obligation on the single information platform referred to in Article 62(3), point (b).
3. The Board shall adopt recommendations, taking into account European competence frameworks, to support the Commission and Member States in the promotion of AI literacy required under paragraph 1, including by setting out common objectives.
This text is meant purely as a documentation tool and has no legal effect. The Union's institutions do not assume any liability for its contents. The authentic versions of the relevant acts, including their preambles, are those published in the Official Journal of the European Union and available in EUR-Lex.
Passages marked with the accent edge in the primary text were inserted or replaced by the amendment.
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Providers and deployers of AI systems shall take measures to ensure, to their best extent, a sufficient level of AI literacy of their staff and other persons dealing with the operation and use of AI systems on their behalf, taking into account their technical knowledge, experience, education and training and the context the AI systems are to be used in, and considering the persons or groups of persons on whom the AI systems are to be used.
What this means for you
In your terms · AI literacy measures
Expect internal training or guidance on the AI systems you build and operate.
In your terms · AI literacy measures
You operate these systems, so the literacy measures cover you; expect to be inside them, not just their audience.
In your terms · AI literacy measures
The people shipping and operating AI features need to understand what the systems do and where they fail.
- Onboarding notes for AI-touching roles
In your terms · AI literacy measures
You decide what supporting AI literacy means in your organization and can show the measures exist. After the amendment the bar is measures, not certified outcomes.
- Team enablement plan for people operating AI systems
Failure smells likeThe people operating the system learned what it does from each other, and whatever measures you took are not written down anywhere.
Obligations derived from this article
Scenarios that touch this provision
A code assistant for your own engineers
Illustrative Reading still settling
An assistant suggests code in the editor and opens pull requests, running against a hosted model.
- Your role
- ProviderDeployer
- Where it lands
- Not classified In force 2 Aug 2026
- Decided by
- No Annex III use case. The open question is Article 50(2), because the assistant generates text.
What you have to be able to produce
- Content marking in the generation pipeline
- Onboarding notes for AI-touching roles
- Provenance-preservation test in CI
- Team enablement plan for people operating AI systems
What would change the answer
- Article 50(2) does not apply to the extent a system performs an assistive function for standard editing or does not substantially alter the input data or its semantics. Whether a generated patch is assistive editing is exactly the line this exemption draws, and it is not settled.
- Generated code that ships inside a product covered by Annex I harmonisation legislation is a question about that product, not about the assistant.
- Use it to evaluate engineers rather than to help them and Annex III point 4(b) applies.
A customer-support chatbot on your public site
Illustrative
The same stack, pointed outward: a chatbot that answers customer questions, drafts replies and escalates to a human when it cannot answer.
- Your role
- ProviderDeployer
- Where it lands
- Any risk level In force 2 Aug 2026
- Decided by
- Article 50(1): a system intended to interact directly with natural persons. The transparency duties attach without the system being high-risk.
What applies
What you have to be able to produce
- Content marking in the generation pipeline
- Disclosure pattern in the design system
- Onboarding notes for AI-touching roles
- Provenance-preservation test in CI
- Reusable disclosure component
- Team enablement plan for people operating AI systems
What would change the answer
- If the bot decides access to an essential service rather than describing it, Annex III point 5 puts it in the high-risk tier.
- Article 50(2) marking has an exemption where the system performs an assistive function for standard editing or does not substantially alter the deployer’s input. A bot that writes the answer is not editing yours.
- Publishing its text as an article on a matter of public interest brings Article 50(4) into play, and that duty sits on the deployer.
A product recommender in your storefront
Illustrative
A model ranks what each visitor sees, trained on browsing and purchase history.
- Your role
- ProviderDeployer
- Where it lands
- Not classified In force 2 Feb 2025
- Decided by
- Ranking products is not an Annex III use case and not a safety component. What the system infers about people is what to watch.
What applies
What you have to be able to produce
- Onboarding notes for AI-touching roles
- Team enablement plan for people operating AI systems
What would change the answer
- Price or risk-assess life and health insurance with it and Annex III point 5(c) applies; score creditworthiness and point 5(b) does.
- Article 5 prohibits certain manipulative and exploitative practices outright. A recommender tuned to exploit the vulnerabilities of a specific group is a different object from one tuned to relevance.
- Profiling turns the Article 6(3) escape hatch off for any Annex III system, so it matters what the model infers, not only what it displays.
A RAG assistant over internal documents, on a vendor model
Illustrative
You wrapped a vendor model in a retrieval layer over your own wiki and runbooks, and put it in front of your own staff. Nobody outside the company can reach it.
- Your role
- ProviderDeployer
- Where it lands
- Not classified In force 2 Feb 2025
- Decided by
- No Annex III use case, and not a safety component under Article 6(1). Putting a system into service for your own use still makes you its provider under Article 3(11).
What you have to be able to produce
- Disclosure pattern in the design system
- Onboarding notes for AI-touching roles
- Reusable disclosure component
- Team enablement plan for people operating AI systems
What would change the answer
- Point it at a decision the Act lists. The moment it screens candidates or scores people, Annex III applies and the answer changes completely.
- Article 50(1) asks you to tell people they are interacting with an AI system unless that is obvious. For an internal assistant behind a login it usually is; write down why you concluded that.
- Fine-tune the vendor model and you may become the provider of the modified model, with Chapter V duties for it.
If you would rather not read the law
The basics page explains the Regulation's own categories in order: scope, role, tier, date. The engineering view groups the obligations by the platform capability they demand.