What Article 4 actually requires.
Article 4 of the EU AI Act requires providers and deployers of AI systems to ensure their staff — and anyone else operating or using the system on their behalf — have a sufficient level of AI literacy. It has applied since 2 February 2025, the same date the Article 5 prohibited-practice ban took effect.
Who it covers.
Both providers (organisations building or supplying an AI system) and deployers (organisations using one under their own authority) are in scope — not only technical teams. The obligation follows the system, not the job title: anyone whose role touches an AI system's inputs, outputs, or decisions is in scope for training appropriate to that role.
What "sufficient" means.
The Act doesn't prescribe a course length or format. It asks for literacy proportionate to the technical knowledge, experience, education, and training of the staff in question, and the context the system is used in — a call-centre agent relying on an AI system's suggested response needs different training from an engineer integrating the same system's API.
What it asks for, concretely.
- Technical knowledge — enough to understand what the system does, at the level relevant to the role, not how the model works internally.
- Awareness of what can go wrong — the specific failure modes staff are likely to encounter, not a generic "AI can be wrong" caveat.
- Context of use — literacy appropriate to how the system is actually used, so a customer-facing user and a developer integrating an API are trained differently.
- Evidence it happened — training delivered, not just a policy stating that it should be.
Next: the risk this obligation exists to close.
Article 4 is the regulatory answer to a specific, named risk in the library.