Welcome to Witness — EU AI Act compliance, self-served

The EU AI Act enters into application on 2 August 2026. Most obligations for high-risk systems, including technical documentation (Annex IV), risk management (Art. 9), and post-market monitoring (Art. 72), apply from that date.

For small and mid-sized companies in Europe, the compliance market so far looks like a choice between two extremes: ignore the regulation, or hire consultants at day rates that price most SMEs out. Witness exists for the middle.

What Witness is

Witness is a self-service toolkit that takes an SME from "does the AI Act apply to us?" to "we have the documentation a regulator would expect to see." It includes:

• A risk classifier that walks Article 5, Annex III, and the Article 6(3) exception logic question by question
• A role classifier that determines whether you act as a provider, deployer, importer, or distributor under Chapter III
• Technical documentation aligned to the ten Annex IV sections
• A Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment template for deployers that fall under Article 27
• A risk management system worksheet aligned to Article 9
• An AI literacy module for Article 4 staff-training requirements

Each output is generated from your own inputs. Every question, every field, and every obligation links to the specific article it comes from, so you can check the source yourself.

What Witness is not

• It is not a legal opinion. Complex edge cases — novel high-risk deployments, cross-border conformity assessments, sector-specific overlaps — still benefit from a lawyer.
• It is not a certification body. Conformity assessments under Annex VI or VII stay with the notified bodies and internal processes that the Act defines.
• It does not replace internal governance. It produces the artefacts an internal audit or regulator would expect; your team still has to keep them current.

What's next

This blog will be used sparingly: changes in the regulation, notable implementing acts, and practical notes from the files we see. The changelog tracks product updates release by release.

If you want to check whether your AI system falls under the Act, the classifier is the shortest path — three minutes, no signup.