AI Regulation Tracker  /  Draft legislation

Slovakia's AI Act Implementing Bill Was Still a Draft on Day One

LP/2026/17 would create an Office of Digital Integrity as Slovakia's general AI market surveillance authority. It is a draft. It is not law, it imposes nothing on anyone today, and as of August 3, 2026 no parliamentary print for it was located.

By Anthony Guerriero  ·  Reviewed by Anthony Guerriero  ·  Published August 3, 2026  ·  Updated August 3, 2026  ·  Draft legislation

Key facts

Regulatory briefing

Instrument

Draft Act on Artificial Intelligence and European Data Regulation and amending certain acts (LP/2026/17; LRV-7651/2026)

Authority

Ministry of Investments, Regional Development and Informatization of the Slovak Republic (MIRRI SR); the bill would create the Urad digitalnej integrity

Jurisdiction

Slovakia, within the EU single market

Status

Draft. Registered with the Legislative Council of the Government on March 13, 2026; not enacted and no parliamentary print located as of August 3, 2026

Bindingness

Draft or proposed. Not binding law and creates no obligations in its current form

Effective date

None. The draft proposed May 1, 2026, which passed without enactment. The AI Act itself applies generally from August 2, 2026

Primary source

Urad vlady SR session portal, bill record

What the record actually shows

Start with what this item is not. It is not a law, not a regulation, not a decree and not a designation. It is a draft bill that has been through interministerial consultation and reached the Legislative Council of the Government, which is a stage well short of parliament and further still from the statute book. Nothing in it obliges anyone to do anything today.

The paper trail is unusually clean, so it is worth walking through. The full title is the Act on Artificial Intelligence and European Data Regulation and amending certain acts. It runs under slov-lex process number LP/2026/17 and, at the Legislative Council, as material LRV-7651/2026. The submitting department is MIRRI SR, the Ministry of Investments, Regional Development and Informatization, and the submitter is the minister personally, as an own-initiative proposal rather than a task handed down by government resolution.

Interministerial consultation ran from January 27 to February 4, 2026. The material was registered with the Legislative Council on March 13, 2026 with the status Zaradeny, meaning scheduled, and was placed as item 9 on the agenda of the 41st session of the Legislative Council held on March 17, 2026. A record of that session was filed the following day.

On that same March 17, a second thing happened. The Government Office session portal shows the bill as item 6 on the agenda of the 26th session of the Economic and Social Council of the Slovak Republic, the tripartite body where government, employers and unions meet, scheduled for March 23, 2026. The item page carries a short and unambiguous status line:

Navrh zakona o umelej inteligencii a europskej datovej regulacii a o zmene a doplneni niektorych zakonov ... stiahnuty predkladatelom ... aktualizovane 17.03.2026, 14:59Urad vlady SR session portal, lrv.rokovania.sk, record updated March 17, 2026

Stiahnuty predkladatelom means withdrawn by the submitter. It is tempting to write that sentence up as a collapse. I do not think the record supports it. On the very same date the bill was withdrawn from the tripartite agenda, it was sitting as a live item on the Legislative Council of the Government's own agenda. Pulling a text from one consultative body's meeting is an ordinary procedural move, often to redraft, re-notify or re-table. It is not a vote and it is not a rejection.

So the honest way to state the position is by outcome rather than by cause. As of August 3, 2026, this bill had not been enacted, no parliamentary print for it was located at the National Council of the Slovak Republic, and no law under this title was located in the Zbierka zakonov. Why it has not moved is not something the public record answers, and I am not going to invent an answer for it.

One further document is worth noting, because it is dated the day this piece publishes. MIRRI's own Organizational Order, in the version effective August 3, 2026, still assigns an internal unit responsibility for leading and coordinating the legislative process on the Navrh zakona, the draft bill, and separately for leading and coordinating the process of establishing the general supervisory authority under Regulation (EU) 2024/1689. The ministry's own current house rules therefore describe the instrument as a draft and the supervisor as still being established.

What the bill would do if it were passed

The design is worth understanding even in draft form, because it tells you what Slovak supervision would look like once something like this arrives.

First, the scope is wider than the AI Act. The bill would implement Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 together with the Data Governance Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/868, and the Data Act, Regulation (EU) 2023/2854. That is three EU instruments in one national vehicle. It is an efficient way to legislate and a fragile one: a single bill carrying three regulatory regimes has three sets of stakeholders who can each slow it down, and one procedural problem anywhere in the text delays all of it.

Second, it would create a new body rather than hand the file to an existing regulator. The Urad digitalnej integrity, the Office of Digital Integrity, would be a central state administration body and Slovakia's general AI market surveillance authority. The draft would give it inspection powers, the power to restrict, prohibit, recall or withdraw AI systems from the market, and the power to impose administrative penalties.

I am deliberately not quoting a penalty ceiling. Press coverage of this bill has circulated figures that belong to the AI Act's own prohibited-practices ceiling rather than to the Slovak text, and the specific national ceiling was not read off the draft in the verification pass behind this entry. If a number matters to your risk model, read it from the bill text when a final version exists, not from a summary.

Third, the bill would carry the registration plumbing for the data regulations: data intermediation service providers and data altruism organisations would register with the new office. That is worth flagging for any US firm running a data marketplace or research data programme touching Slovakia, because their counterparty questions are answered by the same instrument.

Fourth, the draft set its own effective date at May 1, 2026. That date has passed. A proposed commencement date in an unpassed bill is not a legal date and never was, and it should not appear in a compliance calendar. The only thing it tells you is what the ministry was aiming at in January.

Why an unenacted national act does not lower your obligations

This is the part professionals get wrong most often, and the error is expensive in both directions.

The AI Act is a Regulation. It applies of its own force in every member state without a national transposing act, and it became generally applicable on August 2, 2026. The absence of an enacted Slovak implementing law in the record reviewed here does not delay, soften or suspend any obligation in it. If you place an AI system on the Slovak market, the Regulation's definitions, prohibitions and provider duties reach you on the Regulation's own terms and on the Regulation's own timetable.

That distinction is easy to state and surprisingly hard to hold onto inside a large organisation. Compliance functions are trained on directives, where the operative text a business reads is the national transposition and the European instrument sits behind it. A Regulation inverts that. The operative text is the European one, and the national act, when it arrives, is the smaller document. If your Slovak entity is waiting for a Slovak statute before it starts classifying systems, it is waiting for the wrong document.

The staged dates likewise come from the Regulation and not from Bratislava. Transparency and marking duties apply from December 2, 2026. Under the Digital Omnibus, high-risk duties move to December 2, 2027 for stand-alone Annex III systems and August 2, 2028 for high-risk systems embedded in products under Annex I. If you are still working from an older internal memo that says August 2, 2027 for high risk, that date is superseded and you should correct it before your next audit committee meeting.

What a national act supplies is different in kind. It supplies the domestic machinery: who the designated market surveillance authority is, who receives a serious incident report, what the national penalty regime looks like, who runs the regulatory sandbox, where a complaint goes and which bodies exercise the Article 77 fundamental-rights powers. Those are procedural questions, but procedure is where compliance actually happens.

On that domestic machinery, the careful statement is this: no national designation instrument in force was identified in the Slovak sources reviewed for this entry, and MIRRI's own August 3, 2026 organizational order describes the establishment of the general supervisory authority as an ongoing process. That is different from asserting that Slovakia has designated nobody. It is a statement about what the reviewed record shows, and it is the strongest claim the record will carry.

What to do on Monday if Slovakia is in your footprint

Four things, in order of how much time they take.

Delete the May 1, 2026 date from any tracker that carries it, and delete any note that records Slovakia as having an AI law. Neither survives contact with the record. Replace both with a single line: implementing bill LP/2026/17 in draft, no enacted national act located as of August 3, 2026.

Then treat your Slovak obligations as Regulation obligations. Classify your systems under the Regulation, run the general purpose AI model analysis if you train or fine-tune, and build your technical documentation to the Regulation's requirements. None of that work is contingent on a Slovak statute, and none of it gets cheaper if the bill takes another year.

Third, plan for the reporting route to be uncertain in the near term. If a serious incident or a market withdrawal question arises in Slovakia before a designation is published, you will need a considered decision about where the notification goes and a written record of why you made it. Get your counsel's view on that now, in calm conditions, rather than inside a 72-hour clock. A documented, reasoned choice made in advance reads very differently to a regulator than an improvised one made under pressure.

Fourth, watch the right places. The Legislative Council material page for LRV-7651/2026 and the slov-lex process page for LP/2026/17 will show movement first. A parliamentary print at the National Council would be the meaningful step, because that is the point at which a ministry draft becomes a government bill in front of legislators. Until a print appears, anything you read about the Slovak AI office is a description of an intention.

A closing caution against the opposite error. A slow national implementing bill is not evidence of a permissive market, and it is not a reason to route EU AI activity through Slovakia. Supervision that arrives late tends to arrive with a backlog and a new institution keen to establish its authority. The systems you place on that market today are the systems it will look at first.

Last verified: August 3, 2026 against the primary sources listed above.