AIAcademy · AIAcademy · 2026-05-16
Article 4 of the EU AI Act has been in force since 2 February 2025. It is short — one paragraph — and quietly historic: the first legally binding AI literacy mandate in any major jurisdiction.
The actual text. Providers and deployers of AI systems "shall take measures to ensure, to their best extent, a sufficient level of AI literacy of their staff and other persons dealing with the operation and use of AI systems on their behalf." That obligation extends to anyone making AI work on the company's behalf — employees, contractors, agency staff.
What "sufficient" means. The European Commission's FAQ declines to set a fixed bar. Sufficiency is contextual: it depends on the AI system's risk class, the user's role, the technical and educational background of the staff, and the context of deployment. A risk-management team at a bank using credit-scoring AI needs a different literacy floor than a marketing team using generative tools. The Commission expects organizations to document their reasoning — training programs, role-based curricula, completion records — as the evidence of "best extent."
Who enforces it. Article 4 itself is supervised by national market surveillance authorities under each member state's AI Act implementation. Unlike the GPAI and prohibited-practice provisions, Article 4 does not have its own headline fine schedule — but it interacts with the broader compliance regime: an organization that cannot demonstrate Article 4 measures will struggle to defend any high-risk-system deployment if something goes wrong.
The international comparison.