The EU AI Act is now in force, and compliance deadlines for high-risk AI systems are approaching. Many mid-market organizations are still figuring out what "record-keeping" actually means in practice. This is why we built AgentTrail: an open-source SDK designed to make AI decision traceability practical, transparent, and affordable.
What Article 12 Actually Requires
The European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) entered into force on 1 August 2024. Article 12, Record-Keeping, requires providers of high-risk AI systems to design those systems so that they automatically generate logs throughout their lifecycle.
These logs must be sufficient to enable monitoring, post-market oversight, incident investigation, and regulatory compliance. The Act also requires that logs be retained for an appropriate period and made available to competent authorities when required.
High-risk AI systems are defined primarily in Annex III of the Regulation and include use cases such as:
