The EU AI Act journey: six gated stages per system

The EU AI Act is the spine of Veritome. It is not a programme and nothing about it is switched on: every registered system walks its own six-stage journey, derived by the rules engine from that system's role and risk tier, in this fixed order:

1. Classify — confirm role, risk tier and prohibited-use screening (Art. 5, Art. 6).
2. Scope & literacy — applicable obligations confirmed and owned, plus the Art. 4 AI-literacy duty.
3. Build & document — risk management (Art. 9), data governance (Art. 10), technical documentation (Art. 11 and Annex IV), human oversight (Art. 14, Art. 26(2)) and the rest of the build work.
4. Conformity assessment — the conformity assessment (Art. 43), the EU declaration of conformity (Art. 47) and CE marking (Art. 48). The fundamental-rights impact assessment (Art. 27), where it applies, sits in Build & document: it must be done before deployment, and Conformity assessment is locked until Build & document is complete.
5. Register — the EU database registration (Art. 49, Annex VIII).
6. Operate & monitor — post-market monitoring (Art. 72), serious-incident reporting (Art. 73) and the scheduled reviews.

Each obligation belongs to exactly one stage, so a stage is complete when all of its applicable obligations are done.

Gate locking

Stages are gate-locked: a stage is locked until every earlier stage that has obligations reaches 100%. A locked stage names what is blocking it, so you always know what to finish first. This mirrors the legal reality — you cannot meaningfully register a system whose conformity assessment is unfinished.

Only the Act's own obligations count toward a gate. A system's GDPR duties sit in a lane of their own inside the stage they belong to, are counted as a second figure, and never lock a stage.

Empty stages

Not every stage applies to every system. A deployer, for example, may have no conformity-assessment obligations at all. Stages with no applicable obligations count as complete automatically and never block later stages — role-specific journeys still reach 100%.

Where you see the journey

• System record — the EU AI Act journey card in the header (obligations done of total, the next obligation, the active stage) with the stage strip beneath it; the Obligations tab lays the obligations out lane by stage and explains a locked one.
• AI systems — the register's Stage column shows each system's current stage, and its EU AI Act column obligations done over total.
• Dashboard — the Your position under the EU AI Act panel: Blocked at a gate counts the systems whose current stage is locked, and Systems by stage shows how many systems sit at each of the six.

A brand-new system whose obligations have not been generated yet shows every stage as pending, not complete — the gate never reads an un-scoped system as finished. Stage progress updates automatically as you complete obligations.

The standards you switch on borrow the same rule: each programme runs in gated phases of its own. See Phases and gates: why the next step is locked.