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EU AI Act Article 2: who is in scope, including outside the EU

Article 2 sets the territorial and material scope of the Regulation, and it reaches well beyond companies established in the EU.

Who is covered

Article 2(1) covers: providers placing AI systems or GPAI models on the EU market or putting them into service in the Union, regardless of where the provider is established; providers and deployers of AI systems located in a third country where the output produced by the system is used in the Union (Article 2(1)(c) — the extraterritorial hook); importers and distributors; product manufacturers placing a system on the market under their own name; authorised representatives of providers not established in the Union; and affected persons located in the Union.

What is excluded

Article 2(3)-(12) carve out AI systems developed or used exclusively for military, defence or national security purposes; systems used solely for scientific research and development prior to being placed on the market; AI components released under free and open-source licences, unless they are prohibited, high-risk, or subject to certain transparency duties; and purely personal, non-professional use by natural persons. Testing under real-world conditions has its own separate regime.

What evidence this implies

If your agent's output reaches EU users, the question "are we in scope" is answered by where the output lands, not where your servers or company sit. Evidence worth keeping: where your users and outputs are geographically, and which parts of your stack, if any, fall under the open-source or research carve-outs.

Gaps to state honestly

"Output used in the Union" is not sharply defined by the Regulation itself, and this guide is not a substitute for a scope opinion from counsel. See our provider vs. deployer guide for the next question once scope is established.

How Vetro helps

Once you know you are in scope, Vetro gives you the record-keeping half: a hash-chained, ed25519-signed ledger of every model call, tool call and policy decision. Vetro Attest verifies that ledger or an OpenTelemetry GenAI trace for free, and for 49 USD issues a counter-signed report mapping it to the Act, including an explicit list of what it cannot show. Not legal advice — for scope questions, consult counsel.

See a sample ledger verified in one click, check your own logs free or get the countersigned EU AI Act report.