Provider or deployer?

There is a question in the EU AI Act that decides most of your obligations, and it is not "is my system high-risk?"

It is "what am I?"

The Act assigns duties by role in the value chain. The gap between the roles is enormous, and answering wrong costs money in both directions — either you budget for work you never owed, or you miss work you did.

The four roles

The whole thing turns on the phrase "under your own name or trademark". Not who wrote the code. Not who trained the model. Whose name is on the thing when it reaches the market.

The mistake founders make most often

"We built it, so we're a provider."

Sometimes true. Often not, and the distinction is worth real money.

If the AI system itself belongs to someone else — a hiring tool you licensed, a support model you call through an API, a scoring product you resell inside your platform — and you are using it in your operations, you are a deployer of that system. You did build something. You built a product around someone else's AI system, and the Act cares about which of those is the AI system in question.

What that removes is substantial. No conformity assessment. No CE marking. No Annex IV technical file. No EU database registration. Those are the expensive, slow, notified-body-dependent obligations, and deployers simply do not have them.

The mistake that runs the other way

Two routes take you into provider duties without you deciding to become a provider.

1. Substantial modification — Article 25

You become the provider of a system that was previously someone else's if you:

• put your own name or trademark on a high-risk system already on the market;
• make a substantial modification to a high-risk system such that it remains high-risk; or
• modify the intended purpose of a system — including one not previously classified as high-risk — so that it becomes high-risk.

That third limb is the one that catches people. Take a general-purpose classification tool, point it at CV screening, ship it to employers under your brand, and you have created a high-risk system with you as its provider. Nobody sent a notification. The original vendor's obligations did not transfer to you — a new set attached to you.

White-labelling is the same trap in a friendlier suit. Reselling under your own brand puts your name on it, and the Act reads names.

2. GPAI — Article 53

A separate question with a separate answer. What did you do to the model?

• API calls or prompting — downstream. Article 53 duties sit with the model provider. Not yours.
• Light fine-tune, same domain, modest dataset — still downstream in the ordinary case.
• Substantial retrain, major parameter change, or a new task domain — you may be a GPAI provider: Annex XI technical documentation, Annex XII downstream information, a copyright and TDM policy, and a public summary of training data.

Applied from August 2025, enforceable from 2 August 2026. The exposed group is teams who did a serious fine-tune in 2025 for performance reasons, when there was no regulatory reason to think about it. More on where that threshold sits.

You are probably both

Most companies of any size hold both roles simultaneously, and the Act does not mind — it just means two obligation sets.

A realistic example. A twenty-person HR-tech company:

• Provider of its own CV-ranking system, sold to employers under its own brand. High-risk under Annex III point 4. Full provider duties by 2 December 2027.
• Deployer of an off-the-shelf AI notetaker used in its own internal hiring. Article 26 duties, and if that notetaker is high-risk, they apply to this company as a user of it.
• Deployer of a support chatbot on its marketing site. Limited risk, Article 50 disclosure, live now.

Three systems, three positions, one company. This is why "what tier is my company?" is not a question the Act can answer. Roles and tiers attach to systems, not to organisations. Every assessment is per system, and a company with three AI systems has three assessments.

Article 26 in full — what deployers actually owe

Worth reading, because it is shorter than people fear:

• Use the system according to the provider's instructions for use
• Assign human oversight to a natural person with the competence, training and authority to exercise it — and the ability to override
• Ensure input data is relevant and sufficiently representative for the intended purpose, to the extent you control it
• Monitor operation and suspend use if the system presents a risk
• Report serious incidents to the provider and the authority
• Keep automatically generated logs for at least six months where they are within your control
• Inform workers and their representatives before putting a high-risk system into use in the workplace
• Inform affected individuals where the system makes or assists decisions about them
• Cooperate with authorities

Real obligations. But no notified body, no CE mark, no technical file, and no eighteen-month runway required.

How to settle it in twenty minutes

1. List your AI systems separately. Not products — systems. The chatbot, the ranking model, the internal notetaker are three entries.
2. For each, ask: whose name is on it when it reaches the market? Yours means provider. Someone else's, and you're using it, means deployer.
3. For each, ask: did we change what it is for? If you repurposed a system into a high-risk use, you are likely its provider now.
4. Separately, ask: did we substantially modify a general-purpose model? Yes means check Article 53.
5. Write down each answer with one sentence of reasoning, and date it.

That last step is the one people skip and the one that has value. A dated page saying "this system, this role, this reasoning" is precisely what an enterprise buyer's legal team is asking for when they send the questionnaire. It is also what makes the difference between "we assessed this" and "we assumed".