AI Governance Briefing — January 23, 2025
With Article 5 prohibitions imminent, Zeph Tech is closing supplier cutovers to verify every banned AI capability is offline, universal opt-outs persist, and evidence dossiers are ready for market-surveillance authorities.
Executive briefing: Article 5 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689—the EU AI Act—bans unacceptable-risk AI systems from . Prohibited practices include biometric categorisation based on sensitive traits, untargeted scraping of facial images, social scoring by public authorities, and AI that manipulates human behaviour causing harm. Zeph Tech is executing a supplier cutover window this week to guarantee that all prohibited capabilities supplied by third parties are decommissioned, contractual guarantees are in place, universal opt-out protections remain intact, and evidence dossiers can be produced instantly for market-surveillance authorities.
Regulatory urgency: The European Commission’s Q&A emphasises that deployers and providers face administrative fines up to EUR 35 million or 7% of global turnover for prohibited AI use. National authorities can order immediate cessation, seize systems, and require detailed technical documentation. With the countdown underway, compliance leaders must coordinate engineering, procurement, legal, privacy, and assurance teams to complete the transition.
Supplier portfolio reconciliation
Start with a comprehensive portfolio inventory:
- System catalogue. List all AI-enabled products, modules, SDKs, and services sourced from third parties. Capture use cases, deployment locations, data inputs, opt-out dependencies, and business owners.
- Article 5 mapping. Classify each capability against the banned categories: biometric categorisation, biometric identification in real time in public spaces (subject to limited law-enforcement derogations), manipulation exploiting vulnerabilities, social scoring, and indiscriminate scraping.
- Decision records. Document whether the capability is being removed, redesigned, replaced, or subject to legal justification. Record approvals by risk, legal, and business stakeholders.
Maintain a traceable register linking each supplier module to remediation tickets, test results, and opt-out safeguarding evidence.
Technical cutover execution
Coordinate engineering teams to decommission prohibited features:
- Code and configuration changes. Remove APIs, disable inference endpoints, revoke credentials, and update configuration flags. For SaaS integrations, ensure feature toggles are permanently disabled and providers confirm removal on their infrastructure.
- Data handling. Purge datasets collected for banned purposes, including biometric templates or scraped facial images. Maintain deletion logs, storage attestations, and cryptographic hashes of residual datasets to prove removal.
- Testing. Execute regression tests verifying that user journeys, admin consoles, and partner APIs cannot re-enable prohibited behaviours. Include negative tests for attempts to bypass opt-out settings.
Capture screenshots, change tickets, and deployment records. Store artefacts with timestamps, approvers, and environment details.
Universal opt-out preservation
Prohibited AI features often intersect with profiling and targeted engagement workflows. Ensure universal opt-out commitments remain intact during cutover:
- Signal continuity. Monitor GPC and other authorised opt-out signals before, during, and after cutover. Confirm no degradation in processing times or suppression accuracy.
- Data segregation. Validate that data warehouses and activation platforms honour opt-out states even after removing prohibited models. Document reconciliation between opt-out registries and outbound communication logs.
- Fallback paths. If replacement capabilities rely on anonymised analytics, verify that anonymisation is robust and irreversibly separates data from opt-out identifiers.
Report opt-out metrics to governance committees and record any overrides with legal justification and restoration timelines.
Contractual remediation and governance
Procurement and legal teams must align contracts with Article 5 obligations:
- Amendments and terminations. Issue contract amendments requiring vendors to certify removal of prohibited functions, destruction of associated data, and prohibition of shadow deployments. Terminate agreements where remediation is not feasible.
- Representations and warranties. Obtain updated warranties covering EU AI Act compliance, opt-out support, data provenance, and audit cooperation. Include indemnities for non-compliance.
- Ongoing monitoring. Schedule quarterly attestations and audits. Require vendors to notify Zeph Tech before introducing new AI capabilities that could trigger Article 5 scrutiny.
Maintain a contract tracker detailing amendment status, signatories, effective dates, and documentation storage locations.
Evidence dossier preparation
Market-surveillance authorities can request technical documentation at any time. Build a ready-to-share dossier for each deprecated capability:
- System description. Summarise the original capability, intended purpose, data sources, training methodology, and reasons it fell under Article 5.
- Withdrawal narrative. Document the timeline of disablement actions, approvals, testing, and stakeholder communications.
- Data governance. Include records of data deletion, retention policy updates, opt-out reconciliation, and evidence that no personal data continues to feed prohibited pipelines.
- Third-party attestations. Attach supplier certificates, audit reports, and evidence of oversight meetings.
Store dossiers in a tamper-evident repository with access controls and retention aligned to EU AI Act requirements.
Change management and communications
Transparent communication prevents customer confusion and builds trust:
- Internal alignment. Brief customer success, sales, and support teams on removed features, compliant alternatives, and talking points about universal opt-out protections.
- Customer notices. Provide proactive updates explaining functional changes, emphasising safety and compliance benefits. Respect opt-out preferences when distributing notices and track delivery evidence.
- Training. Update playbooks for operations, legal, privacy, and engineering teams. Record attendance and comprehension checks.
Ensure knowledge bases and product documentation reflect new functionality and contact points for questions.
Operational readiness checks
- Runbooks. Update incident response, change management, and access control runbooks to reflect removed capabilities and escalation contacts.
- Monitoring. Enhance observability to detect attempts to reintroduce prohibited features. Configure alerts for unusual API calls, configuration changes, or data ingestion patterns linked to banned practices.
- Audits. Schedule internal audits to verify cutover completion, evidence quality, and opt-out compliance. Track findings and remediation timelines.
Include cutover status in risk committee agendas until all remediation items are closed.
Cross-regulatory alignment
Article 5 compliance intersects with other frameworks:
- GDPR. Ensure lawful bases remain valid after removing prohibited processing. Update records of processing activities (ROPAs) and data protection impact assessments to reflect changes.
- Consumer privacy laws. Harmonise universal opt-out handling across EU and U.S. jurisdictions (New Jersey, Colorado, California) so suppression logic remains consistent when AI-driven engagement tools change.
- AI risk management standards. Align documentation with NIST AI Risk Management Framework and ISO/IEC 42001 to demonstrate structured governance.
Prepare talking points linking Article 5 actions to broader responsible AI strategies.
Timeline for the final week
- Day −7 to −5. Finalise inventory, confirm remediation plans, and gather baseline opt-out metrics.
- Day −4 to −2. Execute technical removals, run regression tests, collect supplier attestations, and update documentation.
- Day −1. Conduct executive sign-off, freeze configurations, snapshot evidence repositories, and prepare regulator-ready briefings.
- Day 0. Verify production monitoring, confirm opt-out signals process correctly, brief customer-facing teams, and archive final reports.
- Post-cutover (Day +1 to +30). Monitor for regressions, complete internal audits, refresh DPIAs, and review lessons learned with suppliers.
Executive call to action: Close every supplier remediation, preserve universal opt-out fidelity, and lock an evidence trail that proves prohibited AI functions are gone. Doing so protects Zeph Tech and its customers from enforcement action and demonstrates leadership in responsible AI deployment.
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