EU AI Act Omnibus status: June 2026

Agreed but Not Yet Law: The EU AI Act Omnibus in June 2026

The Digital Omnibus on AI was provisionally agreed on 7 May 2026, but it has not been adopted or published. Until the Official Journal says otherwise, 2 August 2026 remains the legal date for high-risk obligations. Here is the procedural state of play and what to do with it.

AIRiskAware

Specialist AI Risk Governance & Compliance

Agreed is not adopted

On 7 May 2026 the European Parliament and the Council reached a provisional political agreement on the Digital Omnibus on AI, the first amending package for the EU AI Act, and on 13 May the Council published the agreed compromise text. The substance is settled barring legal scrubbing. The legal status is not: a provisional agreement binds no one, and as of June 2026 the Omnibus has not been adopted, published or brought into force.

The steps still to run

Four things have to happen, in order. The European Parliament must approve the text in plenary, expected in the June to July window. The Council must then formally adopt it. The text undergoes legal-linguistic revision. It is then published in the Official Journal of the European Union and enters into force days later. All of this is expected before 2 August 2026, and for good reason: that is the date the original high-risk obligations would otherwise begin to apply.

Why the sequencing matters

Until the Official Journal publishes the Omnibus, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 as adopted remains the law, which means high-risk obligations for stand-alone Annex III systems still formally attach on 2 August 2026. Legal analysts have been precise on this point: the new dates bind only once published, so 2 August 2026 remains a live compliance date until then. Compliance programmes built against August 2026 should not stand down on the strength of a press release; they should re-baseline only when the publication lands.

What changes once it is law

The headline is the staggered deferral: high-risk obligations move to 2 December 2027 for stand-alone Annex III systems and to 2 August 2028 for AI embedded in Annex I regulated products. Transparency obligations under Article 50 still apply from 2 August 2026, with limited additional time, to 2 December 2026, for certain machine-readable content-marking duties. The package also adds a new Article 5 prohibition on AI tools that generate non-consensual intimate imagery or child sexual abuse material, extends documentation simplifications to SMEs and small mid-caps, expands regulatory sandboxes including an EU-level sandbox, and reinforces the AI Office's central role for general-purpose AI oversight. The GPAI obligations in force since August 2025 are not reopened. Our May analysis, what the May 2026 delays mean, explains why the deferral is a re-sequencing rather than a reprieve, and the EU AI Act timeline tracker carries the consolidated dates.

Enforcement is being built while the clock moves

The deferral has not paused the machinery. On 19 May 2026 the Commission opened feedback on draft guidelines for classifying high-risk AI systems, the interpretive layer organisations will be assessed against, and on 1 June 2026 it announced independent expert support for AI Act enforcement. The signal for governance teams is straightforward: the obligations are moving later and getting better tooled, not getting smaller.

What to do in the meantime

Three moves. Keep the August 2026 assumption in risk registers until the Official Journal says otherwise, with the December 2027 date as the planning case. Use the extra runway on the things the deferral was granted for: inventory and classification against the draft guidelines, data governance, human oversight design and technical documentation. And keep Article 50 transparency work on its original schedule, because it was never deferred.