Article 4 was rewritten — 'ensure' became 'support'
Most guides to Article 4 of the EU AI Act — including, until this month, ours — describe an obligation that no longer reads the way it did. In June 2026 the EU adopted the Digital Omnibus on AI, and one of its quieter amendments rewrote the AI literacy duty. If your program was built on the old wording, here is what actually changed, and what didn’t.
What changed
The original Article 4 required providers and deployers of AI systems to “ensure, to their best extent, a sufficient level of AI literacy” of their staff and other persons operating AI on their behalf. The amended text asks them to take measures to support the development of AI literacy — an obligation of effort, not of result. No specific, measurable level of competence per person is required.
Two things are worth reading closely in that sentence. “Ensure a sufficient level” was an outcome. “Take measures to support the development” is an activity. And the scope did not shrink: your staff and the other people using AI systems on your behalf — contractors and agencies included — are still who the measures are for.
How it got here
The European Commission’s original Omnibus proposal (November 2025) went further: it would have lifted the obligation from organizations entirely and turned it into a duty of the Commission and member states to encourage literacy — analysis by Morrison Foerster covers that version. The final deal between Parliament and Council walked that back: the duty stays on providers and deployers, in softened form. The accompanying recital is explicit about the reasoning — a one-size-fits-all approach to literacy was seen as unsuitable, and mandating uniform levels as a disproportionate cost, especially for smaller companies (Mishcon de Reya’s analysis quotes the agreed text).
The definition of AI literacy itself did not change. Article 3(56) still describes the “skills, knowledge and understanding” that allow people “to make an informed deployment of AI systems” and “to gain awareness about the opportunities and risks of AI and possible harm it can cause.”
Honestly: the stick got smaller
We sell AI literacy programs, so read this section as being against our interest. Article 4 never carried a dedicated fine — the €35M headline numbers belong to other parts of the Act — and the amendment moved the duty further from anything an authority could fail you on. Anyone still selling literacy training on fear of Article 4 penalties is selling you the 2024 text.
So why keep a program at all? Four reasons that survived the rewrite:
- Supervision still starts. National market surveillance authorities supervise Article 4 from 2 August 2026, per the Commission’s AI literacy Q&A. “Show us your measures” is a question you should be able to answer well.
- Incidents don’t read amended recitals. If an employee ships a harmful AI output to a customer, “we had no structured program” is a hard sentence to say in any liability, insurance, or procurement conversation. The legal wording softened; the expectation in disputes did not.
- Your GDPR duties are untouched. The way employees actually use AI — pasting customer data into personal accounts — is a data protection problem that no Article 4 amendment fixes.
- The capability is the point. People who understand what AI can and cannot do make better decisions with it. That was the business case before February 2025, and it doesn’t expire.
What to change in your program
Nothing downward. The practical shift is in what you optimize for: with no outcome level to point at, your documented measures become the entire compliance artifact — who was trained, on what, tailored how, evidenced where. We unpack that in AI literacy evidence — prove effort, not scores, and the full timeline shows how the supervision date fits the rest of the Act.
Our readiness program was built for exactly this shape of obligation: role-based measures, adapted to what each person actually does with AI, with evidence produced by the learning itself. If your program still targets the old wording, book a walkthrough and we’ll map the delta.
Ulern builds readiness and evidence. This post explains the amendment in plain terms — it is not legal advice.