The EU AI Act, as the first broad legislative effort to regulate AI technologies globally, aims to establish a trustworthy environment for AI within the EU market. It employs a risk-based approach where obligations are proportionate to the risks posed by these systems. One of the important goals of this approach is to ensure that harms are minimized without hindering the development and use of innovative AI.

Aligning with this overarching goal, the EU AI Act outlines specific considerations for small and medium-sized enterprises (“SMEs”) and start-ups to support innovation among emerging players.These considerations range from giving them free access to regulatory sandboxes, to being more lenient regarding documentation. In this blog post, we give an overview of the considerations made for SMEs under the EU AI Act.