AI Governance Briefing — September 26, 2025

Executive briefing: The EU Data Act’s core switching and interoperability obligations entered into application on September 12, 2025, forcing AI platform owners to prove they can migrate workloads, metadata, and model artefacts without punitive lock-in. Zeph Tech is translating Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 into concrete runbooks: mapping which AI services trigger Article 23 switching duties, rehearsing extraction of training corpora and embeddings, and documenting how smart-contract kill switches preserve safety controls during exit exercises.

Key enforcement milestones

Switching rights now enforceable. Article 23 grants business users the right to port data, digital assets, and related metadata between data-processing services with 30-day switching windows and phased fee caps that drop entirely after January 2027.
Egress and termination transparency. Article 25 requires providers to disclose all switching charges up front, while Article 28 obliges them to offer tools and documentation that keep APIs, schemas, and security controls compatible across destinations.
Smart contract controls. Article 30 mandates safe termination mechanisms for smart contracts governing data sharing—critical for AI ecosystems that automate data purchases or model-access entitlements.

Operational priorities

Catalogue AI dependencies. Inventory which generative AI, analytics, and MLOps services qualify as “data processing services,” tagging ones that rely on proprietary storage formats so switching tests cover embeddings, feature stores, and lineage metadata.
Rebuild contract playbooks. Update procurement templates so new AI vendors commit to Article 23 switching support, publish export tooling roadmaps, and attest that any remaining fees taper to zero on the statutory schedule.
Align with EU AI Act duties. Connect Data Act switching rehearsals with Article 53 GPAI documentation and high-risk AI post-market monitoring plans to preserve evidence trails when workloads migrate.

Enablement moves

Run quarterly switching exercises that export training corpora, annotations, and system cards into vendor-agnostic formats while validating rehydration on alternate clouds.
Deliver workshops for procurement, legal, and data platform teams covering Article 23–30 obligations, including how to challenge residual fees through national authorities.
Instrument dashboards that track switching SLAs, export tool readiness, and open support tickets so leaders can evidence compliance to EU market surveillance authorities.

Sources

Zeph Tech operationalises Data Act compliance for AI platforms by synchronising portability rehearsals, contract governance, and EU AI Act documentation.