What penalties apply for breaching Article 4?
The 35 million figure circulates everywhere and is almost always misapplied. What fine actually attaches to a lack of training, who imposes it, and what happens long before you get there.
If you have looked into the EU AI Act, you will have met the figure of 35 million euros in headlines and sales decks. It is worth setting the record straight, because that amount does not attach to Article 4, and using it to talk about training is simply incorrect.
The Regulation's three penalty tiers
Article 99 sets out a tiered regime. From most to least severe:
- Up to 35 million euros or 7% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher: reserved for the prohibited practices in Article 5 (social scoring, emotion recognition in the workplace, biometric categorisation and the like).
- Up to 15 million or 3%: breaches of obligations on providers, deployers, importers or distributors, including those for Annex III high-risk systems.
- Up to 7.5 million or 1%: supplying incorrect, incomplete or misleading information to authorities.
So where does Article 4 sit?
Here is the nuance almost nobody explains: Article 99 does not list Article 4 among the infringements carrying a set fine. AI literacy is a genuine obligation, enforceable since February 2025, but the Regulation assigns it no amount of its own.
That does not make breaching it free, and it is worth understanding why. A lack of training is rarely penalised on its own: it surfaces as an aggravating factor once something has gone wrong. If a high-risk system has been misused, or an employee has leaked personal data into a public tool, the authority's question will be whether that person had received adequate training. At that point, absent evidence turns an incident into demonstrable negligence.
Who actually enforces it
Each Member State designates its market surveillance authorities. Germany gives the coordinating role to the Bundesnetzagentur; Spain to AESIA; France to the DGCCRF alongside sectoral regulators. The specific amount is calibrated by severity, duration, company size and — this matters — whether there was cooperation and corrective action.
The risk that arrives before the fine
For most small and mid-sized companies the first real consequence will not be an inspection: it will be a customer. Large organisations are already writing AI Act compliance clauses into contracts and supplier questionnaires. Being unable to evidence your team's training starts costing contracts before it costs fines.
Frequently asked
Can we be fined purely for not training our staff?
Article 99 sets no specific amount for Article 4, so an isolated penalty on that ground alone is unlikely. What is likely is that a lack of training aggravates the assessment of another breach or of an incident that has already happened.
Does the 35 million figure apply to my company?
Only if you engage in one of the prohibited practices in Article 5. For the vast majority of companies that simply use AI tools in daily work, the relevant tier is 15 million or 3%, and only where they breach obligations that fall on them as deployers.
Is training worth anything if an incident happens anyway?
Yes, and that is precisely when it is worth most. Penalty calibration takes into account the measures the organisation adopted. Being able to show documented, verifiable training changes the conversation: from negligence to an incident despite reasonable measures.
What to do with this
The practical takeaway is not to be frightened by a figure that probably does not apply to you, but to understand that training is what turns an open-ended obligation into concrete evidence. If you want to know which penalty tier matches your actual use of AI, our free assessment works it out and tells you the date from which each obligation becomes enforceable.
This article is general information based on the text of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689. It is not legal advice and does not replace consulting a qualified professional: assessing a specific case depends on circumstances an article cannot capture.
Want to know whether Article 4 applies to you, and from when?
Take the free assessment