Most EU states miss deadline to designate AI Act enforcement authorities

The EU AI Act required member states to designate national market-surveillance authorities and notifying authorities — the bodies responsible for policing compliance and certifying conformity assessments — by 2 August 2025. Most states missed it, according to a compliance tracker maintained outside the EU institutions, which found only a small number had completed both designations on time; many had not published implementation plans at all.

The deadline applied to enforcement infrastructure, not to the substantive obligations of the Act, which phase in on a separate schedule running through 2027. Without a designated authority, however, an EU country lacks the legal mechanism to investigate or penalise non-compliant AI systems within its borders, so the miss represented a capacity gap rather than a change to the law’s substance.

The shortfall became part of the case the European Commission later made for its “Digital Omnibus” simplification package, which proposed delaying and streamlining parts of the Act’s enforcement regime on the grounds that member states and companies were not ready to implement it as scheduled. The episode illustrated a recurring pattern in the Act’s rollout: ambitious deadlines set in the legislative text running ahead of the administrative capacity needed to enforce them.