Economy
Why Brussels Quietly Loosened the AI Act — and What It Means for Czech Businesses
Brussels/Prague — Less than two years after the EU AI Act became the first comprehensive AI law of its kind in the world, the bloc has already rewritten a meaningful part of it. For Czech companies bracing for the Act's toughest obligations, the rewrite buys real time — but not, regulatory lawyers caution, a reprieve from the underlying compliance work.
By Jan · Contributor · Independent Journalist · Published
Jan is an independent contributor to the Czech Business Review; his views and sourcing are his own.
The European Commission proposed what became known as the "Digital Omnibus on AI" in November 2025, barely a year after the Act itself entered into force. The Council and Parliament reached political agreement on 7 May 2026, Parliament formally endorsed it on 16 June, the Council gave final sign-off on 29 June, and the law entered into force on 27 July 2026 — a remarkably fast legislative turnaround by EU standards, reflecting how much political pressure had built up behind it. The headline change: the AI Act's toughest requirements, covering high-risk systems used in areas like biometrics, critical infrastructure, employment and border management, have had their compliance deadlines pushed back — with rules for AI embedded in regulated products extended to August 2028, and rules for high-risk use cases in sensitive areas like employment and migration extended to December 2027, both roughly a year or more later than originally scheduled.
The politics behind the reversal
The Omnibus did not emerge from nowhere. It sits inside a much broader "simplification agenda" the Commission launched following the Draghi and Letta reports on European competitiveness, both of which argued — bluntly, for EU policy documents — that overlapping regulation was actively holding back European technology investment relative to the US and China. The Budapest Declaration of November 2024 called explicitly for a "simplification revolution," and the Commission responded with ten separate Omnibus packages spanning sustainability, defence, chemicals and digital rules, of which the AI Omnibus is one. The Council's own framing on final adoption was unambiguous about the intent: strengthening "digital sovereignty and overall competitiveness" by reducing recurring administrative costs for companies deploying AI.
What actually changes for businesses
Beyond the headline deadline extensions, the practical changes are narrower and more technical than "simplification" might suggest. Small and medium-sized enterprises gain simplified technical-documentation requirements that are now explicitly extended to small mid-cap companies as well — a meaningful expansion given how many mid-market Czech firms sit just above the traditional SME threshold. Access to regulatory sandboxes, including a new EU-level sandbox, is being broadened to let more companies test AI systems under supervised, lower-risk conditions before full compliance obligations bite. And the Commission has moved to clarify overlap between the AI Act and existing product-safety law — particularly the Machinery Regulation — to reduce the risk of Czech manufacturers facing duplicate compliance regimes for the same automated system.
Not every observer reads the Omnibus as a pure win for business certainty, however. Analysts at the Jacques Delors Centre have argued that some of the accompanying data-protection changes — including a broadened definition treating AI training as a "legitimate interest" under GDPR — introduce their own legal ambiguity, and that German industry groups in particular have warned the changes could create as much fresh uncertainty as they resolve, potentially offsetting some of the compliance-cost savings the Commission is promising.
The Czech angle
For Czech businesses specifically, the timing intersects directly with the country's own National AI Strategy implementation, which had already earmarked roughly CZK 232m for 2026-2028 to build domestic AI Act enforcement capacity — a regulatory sandbox, market-surveillance functions, and a new AI Competence Centre for e-government. The Omnibus's deadline extensions give that build-out more runway to mature before the toughest obligations land, a genuine advantage for a country whose institutions were, per regional AI-governance assessments, already tracking ahead of most CEE peers on compliance readiness. The practical advice from Czech legal and AI-implementation advisors has been consistent even before the Omnibus passed: treat AI governance as an ongoing operational capability with a named internal owner, not a one-off compliance project — advice the extended timeline makes easier to act on, but does not remove the underlying obligation to do.