Article 49 Makes Your EU AI Act Compliance Public

Most teams assume compliance is private paperwork between them and a regulator. For high-risk AI, Article 49 makes that assumption incorrect. Before you can put an Annex III high-risk system on the EU market, you have to register it in a central EU database, and most of what you file is public.

Various documents, like your technical file, conformity assessment, post-market monitoring plan and signed Declaration of Conformity aren’t visible to anyone outside your company or your notified body. Registration as required by Article 49 is different. It puts your name, contact details, your system, and its intended purpose in a database that competitors, journalists, customers, and campaigners can search.

What Article 49 actually requires

Registration is required before your system goes live on the EU market. Conformity assessment comes first. It proves the system meets the requirements and earns the CE mark. Registration is the second step. Article 49(1) says “the provider or, where applicable, the authorised representative shall register themselves and their system in the EU database” before the system is placed on the market or put into service.

The database itself is set up under Article 71 and run by the European Commission. There is one central record for the whole EU, not a separate filing in each Member State.

Note: At the time of writing the database is not live. The Commission has not launched it or announced a date. The registration duty applies from December 2027. We will update this article when an official announcement has been made.

Who has to register?

This gets confusing because the answer depends on the classification of the system and is different for providers and deployers. Work through it in order.

Providers of Annex III high-risk systems (Article 49(1)). If you provide a high-risk system in one of the Annex III categories, you register yourself and the system. This is the main case. It excludes Annex III point 2 (safety components in critical infrastructure), which is handled separately.

Providers who claim the Article 6(3) exemption (Article 49(2)). If your system falls in an Annex III category but you have decided it is not high-risk under Article 6(3), you still have to register it. You cannot quietly self-exempt. The exemption becomes a public entry stating that you made the call and why. This will catch many teams off-guard. We’ve written about the Article 6(3) exemption trap previously.

Deployers, but only public-sector ones (Article 49(3)). Deployers that are public authorities, Union institutions, bodies, offices or agencies — or persons acting on their behalf — register themselves, select the already-registered system, and register their use of it. A city council using an AI benefits-eligibility tool is in scope, and so is a private contractor running the system on that council’s behalf. A private company deploying the same tool for its own purposes is not. If you are an ordinary commercial deployer, Article 49 does not ask you to register at all.

Biometrics, law enforcement, and migration (Article 49(4)). Systems in Annex III points 1, 6 and 7 that are used in law-enforcement, migration, asylum and border-control contexts register into a secure, non-public section of the database. Only the Commission and national authorities can see those entries. A point 1 biometric system used outside those contexts is not automatically in the secure section. This is the real limit on the word “public”, and it is worth stating plainly rather than implying the whole database is open.

Critical infrastructure (Article 49(5)). Annex III point 2 systems register at national level and stay out of the EU database.

If you are a private business deploying a bought-in high-risk system, the short version is: your provider registers, you do not. Article 49 imposes no filing duty on you. As a practical control, though, it is worth recording the provider’s database entry and checking that the system you use is the one that was registered.

What the database makes public

The registration is not a tick-box. Annex VIII sets out the fields, and for providers the list is substantial:

• The provider’s name, address, and contact details. The provider is the legal entity or natural person that places the system on the market, so for a company this is the business’s details, not an individual’s. A separate field names the person who submits the registration, if someone files it on the provider’s behalf.
• The system’s trade name and an unambiguous reference that lets it be identified and traced
• The intended purpose and the functions the system supports
• “A basic and concise description of the information used by the system (data, inputs) and its operating logic”
• The market status (available, withdrawn, recalled)
• Certificate details from a notified body, where one was involved, and a scanned copy
• A copy of the EU Declaration of Conformity
• The Member States where the system is on the market
• The electronic instructions for use
• An optional link to more information

Public-authority deployers file a shorter set under Annex VIII, including their contact details, a link to the provider’s entry, a summary of the findings of their fundamental rights impact assessment, and, where applicable, a summary of the data-protection impact assessment.

Article 71(4) is the clause that makes this matter: the information must be “accessible and publicly available in a user-friendly manner” and “easily navigable and machine-readable”. The database is effectively a live index of Annex III high-risk systems placed on the EU market, subject to the secure and national-level exceptions, sorted by provider. Your entry would tell a rival which Member States you sell in, what the tool is for, and roughly how it works. The Act doesn’t let you keep any of that secret. Plan the description you file accordingly. Make it accurate, but write it knowing it will be read by people who are not regulators.

The timing, and a change that nearly happened

Registration does not have its own deadline. It is a precondition to going to market, so it applies when the Annex III high-risk obligations apply. The Digital Omnibus sets that date at 2 December 2027: the text has been adopted by the Parliament and the Council but not yet published in the Official Journal, so the original AI Act timetable technically governs until publication. If you are preparing a high-risk system for the EU market, registration is part of that 2027 readiness, not a separate track.

One detail is worth knowing because it shows how close this obligation came to shrinking. The Commission’s original Omnibus proposal would have removed the duty to register Article 6(3)-exempt systems. The Council put it back, and simplified the data set instead. So the 49(2) exempt-registration duty survives, in a lighter form. If you built your plan around the earlier proposal, check it again: you still register the systems you have decided are not high-risk.

What to do now

1. Sort your systems into the four buckets. For each Annex III system, decide whether you register it as high-risk (49(1)), register it as claimed-exempt (49(2)), fall under the public-body deployer rule (49(3)), or sit in the secure or national-level carve-outs (49(4) and 49(5)).
2. If you are a provider, treat registration as part of launch, not after it. The entry needs the Declaration of Conformity and instructions for use, so it depends on conformity assessment being finished. Sequence it that way.
3. Write the public fields for a public reader. The intended-purpose and operating-logic descriptions are searchable. Make them accurate and complete without handing competitors more than the Act requires.
4. If you claimed an Article 6(3) exemption, register it. Document the assessment behind it too. An unregistered exempt system is an easy breach for an auditor to spot.
5. If you are a private-sector deployer, keep the provider’s registration on file. You do not register, but you should be able to point to the entry for the system you use.

Article 49 turns a slice of your compliance into a public record. That is uncomfortable if you assumed it would stay private, but it is also a planning fact you can work with: know which systems you will have to name, decide what each entry will say, and get conformity assessment done early enough that registration is a formality rather than a scramble.