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EU AI Act Article 74: market surveillance authority powers

Article 74 anchors the AI Act's enforcement in the existing EU market surveillance framework, Regulation (EU) 2019/1020, and adds AI-specific powers on top of it.

What Article 74 gives authorities

Market surveillance authorities can require providers to produce technical documentation, request access to logs and records the provider or deployer holds, and — under Article 74(13), where necessary and proportionate, and subject to conditions protecting intellectual property and trade secrets — request access to the source code of a high-risk AI system. Article 74(8)-(9) sets out coordination between authorities when a system falls within the scope of both the AI Act and other Union harmonisation legislation, and designates which authority leads.

Who it applies to

Providers and deployers of high-risk AI systems operating in the EU market. The powers run through the national market surveillance authority designated by each Member State, coordinated at Union level with the AI Office for GPAI-related matters.

What evidence this implies

A request under Article 74 is not hypothetical — it means producing, on a defined timeline, documentation and logs that were supposed to already exist under Article 11 and Article 12. The gap between "we could reconstruct this" and "we can hand this over today" is exactly what an authority's request exposes.

Gaps to state honestly

Source-code access is the exception, not the default route, and is bounded by confidentiality protections; most surveillance activity works through documentation and logs rather than code review. A verifiable log does not substitute for the technical documentation itself — the two answer different questions.

How Vetro helps

When an authority asks for the logs, "we have logs" is not the same as "these logs are unmodified since they were written." Vetro's hash-chained, ed25519-signed ledger lets you hand over records whose integrity can be checked independently of your own infrastructure. Paste a ledger or an OpenTelemetry GenAI trace into the free checker to see what it covers, and Vetro Attest produces a 29 USD counter-signed report mapping it to the Act's record-keeping articles. Not legal advice.

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