On 2 August 2026 the main body of the EU AI Act became applicable: the duties for high-risk systems, the transparency rules, and the national enforcement machinery. Breaches of those duties can cost up to €15M or 3% of worldwide turnover; the €35M / 7% ceiling belongs to the practices Article 5 bans outright, and has applied since 2025.

The offices that apply all this are national. Member states had to name them by 2 August 2025. On the June 2026 count, nine of twenty-seven had named the full set.

The law itself has existed since 2024. The outright bans came first, in February 2025. Last Sunday brought the main body: what the Act calls high-risk systems — the software that filters job applications, scores students, checks people at borders, helps decide who gets credit or care — plus the duty to tell people when they are dealing with a machine, and the enforcement machinery itself.

The same law gave every member state until 2 August 2025 to have its enforcers ready. Not to build an agency from scratch: an existing regulator can be handed the job. But it did require something real — name the authority, resource it, notify the Commission, publish how to reach it.

Europe built enforcement in two storeys. The upper one works: the largest general-purpose models are supervised centrally from Brussels by the Commission's AI Office, which can demand documents, run its own evaluations and fine a model's provider.

The lower storey is national, and that is where almost everything touching an ordinary person sits. For those systems the law does not send you to Brussels — it sends you to a market surveillance authority in your own country. Article 85 gives you personally the right to complain to it. Whether that right has an address depends on your government.

When the law sets a deadline for a company, the consequence is built into the same law: the percentage is written down and the arithmetic does the rest. When it sets a deadline for a government, there is no such machinery — only an infringement procedure that Brussels must choose to start, and that ends in money only after a second court judgment, years later.

This needs no bad faith to happen. And it is not always even arithmetic: for some of the six, it is a ministry of forty people with no AI specialists on the market. The design problem is that the law cannot tell those two situations apart either.

Three costs, none of them abstract. The citizen holds a right with no address. The firm that prepared competes against one that did not, in a country where nobody checks. And a single market in which the same product meets twenty-seven different chances of examination is not quite single any more.

One caveat, because it matters: a missing authority is not a permission slip. The duties apply from Sunday everywhere, enforcement can arrive later, private parties can litigate meanwhile, and central supervision of the biggest models runs regardless.

Design one starts the duties in a country once its office is real — no dead letters, but protection arrives last where the state is slowest, and slowness starts to shelter local industry.

Design two enforces centrally, as Europe already does for the biggest models and for the largest banks. Uniformity, bought with distance: one door for the whole union, and oversight moved away from the parliament a voter can actually replace.

Design three makes the state's deadline cost something by itself. But withheld money lands on the citizens the missing office was meant to protect — the same victim as design one — and an automatic lever cannot tell a government that would not from one that could not.

Every rule you live under contains at least two deadlines: one for the people who must obey it, and one for the institutions that must be ready to apply it. Which of the two carries a consequence is not a drafting technicality — it decides which half of the law happens on time. And it is decided by people you elect.

So when a government announces that something has been regulated, ask the boring second question: who was told to be ready, by when, and what happens to them if they are not. A law can announce a duty on any day it likes. It can only be enforced on the day someone is standing there.