EU AI Act Starts Aug 2026 - A Practical Checklist for AI Agent Developers

The EU AI Act's high-risk AI system requirements take effect on August 2, 2026 . If you're building AI agents that make decisions affecting people -- purchasing, customer service, hiring, content moderation -- this applies to you. Fines: up to EUR35 million or 7% of global revenue . I'm not a lawyer, but I've read the regulation and built tooling around it. Here's what developers actually need to do, with code examples. What Article 14 Requires (Plain English) Article 14 is about Human Oversight . In summary: Requirement What It Means for Developers Understand capabilities and limitations Log what the agent can and can't do Monitor operation and detect anomalies Record every decision, detect failures Interpret outputs correctly Show why the agent made each decision Decide not to use or override Allow humans to block actions Intervene or interrupt Detect and flag instruction changes The common thread: you need a record of what your agent decided, why, and whether anything went wrong. Th