The AI Act requires a provider established outside the Union to appoint someone inside it who answers to the authorities for the system. Not a mailbox and not a lawyer on call — a named party with its own statutory duties, including the duty to walk away and say why. We take that mandate, and we tell you first what it obliges us to do.
The answer depends on where the provider sits, what you place on the Union market, and whether an EU entity already exists. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere.
These are the duties the Act places on the representative itself, not on you. We list them because a representative who has not read them to you has probably not read them.
Not a contractual right to resign. A duty, owed to the regulator rather than to you, triggered by its own assessment of your conduct. Every serious representative carries it and every serious representative should say so out loud before you sign.
We would rather decline a mandate than hold one we cannot defend. Declining costs us a fee; holding a bad one costs us the standing to hold any of the others.
Representation is a narrow statutory role. Most of what makes an AI product compliant is engineering and assessment work that no representative performs for you.
A representative gives the authorities a party to address. It does not give you a European balance sheet, a euro bank account, a VAT number or the ability to sign as an EU counterparty. Those need an entity.
Member States were required to designate their national competent authorities by 2 August 2025. Many did not. Spain built a dedicated agency for it, the first of its kind in the Union.
A distributor can, in principle, but it puts a commercial partner in a position where it owes the regulator a duty to report you, which tends not to survive the first disagreement about anything else. Law firms often decline the role because it is not advisory work: it carries documentary custody for ten years and an independent reporting obligation. The role suits a party whose business is holding it.
We inform the market surveillance authority immediately, with reasons, because the Act requires it. What you should take from that is not the threat but the sequence: we would have raised the issue with you long before, and the engagement sets out what we would raise and how much time you get. A representative who surprises you has failed at the job.
For Annex III high-risk systems the compliance date moved, and it is now fixed by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, in force since 27 July 2026. Two things did not move. Obligations for general-purpose AI model providers, including representation, have applied since 2 August 2025. And the transparency and labelling rules in Article 50 were not amended, with the marking obligation due on 2 December 2026. The deferral bought engineering time on one track only.
Already required. Article 54 imposes the parallel obligation on GPAI model providers established in third countries, and that track has been live since August 2025. If you have been reading the high-risk timetable and relaxing, you have been reading the wrong column.
The mandate names what it covers. Additional systems are added by amendment and priced individually, because each one goes through the same documentation check — we have to verify the paperwork for each. We would rather charge for an amendment than represent something we have not read.
Possibly not, and if so we will say so. Where the EU subsidiary is itself the provider placing the system on the market, there is an establishment in the Union and the representative requirement does not bite. Where the third-country parent remains the provider and the subsidiary only resells or deploys, it usually does. Which of those describes you is a question of fact about how the product is placed on the market.
No. Different regulation, different appointment, different duties, and one does not satisfy the other. Many non-EU companies need both, and they can be held by the same party, but they are two mandates and two files.