EU AI Act Article 6 — Is Your AI System High-Risk? A Developer Checklist

I spent a weekend reading through the EU AI Act — all 144 pages of it. My goal was simple: figure out if the AI features I ship at work could land me (or my employer) in regulatory trouble. The answer was buried in Article 6 , the section that defines what counts as a "high-risk AI system." And honestly, it's not as straightforward as I expected. So I built myself a checklist. Here it is. What Article 6 actually says Article 6 defines two paths to being classified as high-risk: Path 1 — Your AI system is a safety component of a product (or is itself a product) covered by EU harmonisation legislation listed in Annex I. Think: medical devices, machinery, toys, cars, aviation equipment. Path 2 — Your AI system falls into one of the use cases listed in Annex III . This is the one most software developers need to worry about. If you match either path, you're high-risk. Full stop. That means conformity assessments, technical documentation, human oversight requirements, and penalties up to 35