We only resell a US vendor's AI product in Europe. Are we really an importer?

If you are established in the Union and you place on the EU market a system bearing the name or trademark of a company established outside it, that is the importer role, and it attaches by conduct rather than by contract. The distinction that matters is not whether you wrote code or added margin, but who first makes the system available on the Union market under another party's name. A reseller that buys from a US vendor and sells to EU customers is doing exactly that. An EU subsidiary of the same US group is in the same position, which is the case people miss most often because the group treats itself as one company and the Act treats the legal entities separately.

What does an importer actually have to check before selling a high-risk system?

Four things, before placing it on the market. That the conformity assessment procedure was carried out by the provider. That the technical documentation exists and the system carries its conformity marking, its declaration of conformity and its instructions for use. That the provider has appointed an authorised representative in the Union where one is required. And that nothing in front of you suggests the system is not in conformity or that the documentation has been falsified. These are verification duties, not re-assessment duties: you are confirming that the artefacts exist and are coherent, not repeating the provider's assessment. Which makes the failure mode obvious — most resellers have never asked to see any of them.

What turns a distributor into a provider?

Three acts, any one of which is sufficient. Putting your own name or trademark on a high-risk system already placed on the market. Making a substantial modification to it while keeping it high-risk. Or modifying its intended purpose in a way that makes a system high-risk when it was not before. The first is the one that catches commercial teams, because white-labelling is normal practice in the channel and nothing about it feels like a regulatory event. The consequence is total rather than incremental: you assume the provider's obligations for that system, and the original provider is no longer the provider of it. That means the technical documentation, the quality management system, the registration and the post-market monitoring become yours, for a model you did not build and whose training data you have never seen.

Does a software marketplace or app store have these duties?

Often yes, and the analysis rarely stops at the AI Act alone. A marketplace that makes a third-party high-risk system available on the Union market in the course of a commercial activity looks like a distributor on the face of the definition, whatever the terms of service call it. Platform-specific EU rules layer on their own trader-verification and traceability duties in parallel. The practical question to answer internally is narrow: for each listing, which entity first made that system available in the Union, and does the listing carry the provider's instructions for use? A marketplace whose answer is stored in a screenshot of a vendor portal does not have an answer.

What has to be kept, and for how long?

An importer keeps a copy of the certificate issued by the notified body where applicable, the instructions for use, and the declaration of conformity for ten years after the system is placed on the market, and must be able to hand them to a national authority on a reasoned request in a language that authority can act on. Distributors have the corresponding duty to cooperate and to provide the information and documentation they hold. Ten years is longer than most reseller agreements, longer than most CRM retention policies, and considerably longer than the tenure of whoever ran the deal — so this is a records-management decision, not a legal one. Put the artefacts in a system that outlives the account team and index them by system and version, because a request will name a version.

What do we do if we think a system we distribute is not in conformity?

Do not place it on the market, or if it is already there, do not make it further available until it has been brought into conformity, and inform the provider or importer along with the relevant national authorities. Where the system presents a risk, the information duty is immediate rather than at your convenience. Importers additionally have to keep their own identity and contact details on the system or its packaging or documentation, which is the practical mechanism by which an authority finds you at all. The operational point for a channel business is that you need an internal route for this — a support engineer who notices a model behaving outside its documented purpose has to have somewhere to send that, or the obligation exists only on paper.

EU AI Act Importer and Distributor Obligations 2026: The Roles Nobody Claims

The Role Is Assigned by Conduct, Not by Contract

The most expensive misreading in the channel is that operator roles are allocated by agreement. They are not. The Act describes what each operator does, and an entity that does it holds the role whatever the reseller agreement says about who bears regulatory responsibility. A contract can allocate indemnity between two parties; it cannot move a public-law obligation off the party whose conduct triggered it.

That has a specific consequence for groups with a European entity. A US company selling directly into Europe has an authorised-representative question. A US company selling through its own Irish or Dutch subsidiary has a different one, because the subsidiary is established in the Union and is placing on the market a system that bears the parent's trademark. Internally that is one company shipping its own product. Under the Act it is an importer relationship, and the importer duties are real.

What the Importer Has to Verify

Before a high-risk system is placed on the Union market, the importer verifies that the provider ran the applicable conformity assessment, that the technical documentation exists, that the system carries its conformity marking and is accompanied by its declaration of conformity and instructions for use, and that an authorised representative has been appointed where one is required. The importer also may not place the system on the market if it has reason to consider it non-conforming, or the documentation falsified.

Conformity assessment carried out — with the certificate where a notified body was involved.
Technical documentation drawn up and available on request.
Conformity marking present on the system.
Declaration of conformity and instructions for use accompanying it.
Authorised representative appointed where the provider is outside the Union.
Importer's own name and contact details on the system, packaging or documentation.

Read that list as a procurement gate rather than as legal theory. It is answerable in a single email to the vendor before a deal closes, and unanswerable afterwards at any price. The reason so few channel businesses have asked is that nothing in a normal software purchase order has ever required it, and AI products were sold through the same purchase orders as everything else.

The Distributor's Narrower, Continuing Duty

A distributor makes a system available on the market without being the provider or the importer. The verification duty is lighter — confirm the conformity marking, the declaration and instructions, and that the provider and importer have complied with their own obligations — but it does not stop at the point of sale. A distributor that considers a system it has made available not to be in conformity has to take the corrective action needed to bring it into conformity, withdraw or recall it, or ensure the provider or importer does, and inform the relevant authorities.

Storage and transport conditions sit in the same clause and read as an afterthought until you translate them into software: a distributor is responsible for not degrading conformity while the system is under its control. For a managed service provider that hosts, configures and updates a customer's deployment, "under its control" is a much broader window than the word distribution suggests.

The Clause That Rewrites Your Role

The provision channel businesses most need to read is the one that reassigns the provider role. A distributor, importer, deployer or other third party becomes the provider of a high-risk system, with all of the provider's obligations, if it puts its name or trademark on a system already placed on the market, makes a substantial modification to it while it remains high-risk, or modifies the intended purpose of a system so that it becomes high-risk.

Each of those is a routine commercial act. White-labelling a vendor's model under your own brand is the default in the MSP market. Fine-tuning on customer data, adding a retrieval layer, or changing thresholds so a recommendation becomes a decision are routine implementation work. Marketing a general-purpose assistant specifically for recruitment screening or credit triage is a purpose change made in a product page rather than in code.

When the role flips, the original provider is no longer the provider of that system, and you inherit the technical documentation, the quality management system, the registration obligation and post-market monitoring for a model whose training data and evaluation history you have never seen. The provider does have to cooperate and supply what you need — but the obligation to hold the file is yours, and cooperation is a weaker thing to depend on than possession.

A Channel Compliance Checklist

List every AI product you resell, host or bundle, and name the entity that first made it available in the Union.
Classify each: provider, importer, distributor, deployer — by conduct, then check whether the contract agrees.
For anything plausibly high-risk, request the documentation set before renewal, not after an inquiry.
Flag every white-label and every deployment where you fine-tune, re-thresholds or re-purpose.
Put the certificate, declaration and instructions in a ten-year archive indexed by system and version.
Add your importer contact details to the artefacts you ship, not only to your website.
Build an internal escalation route for a suspected non-conformity, and name the person who owns it.

Questions Channel Teams Are Asking

Our vendor says it handles all EU AI Act compliance. Is that enough?

It is enough for the vendor's own obligations and irrelevant to yours. The verification duties exist precisely because the Union authority cannot reach a provider established abroad as easily as it can reach the entity established in Europe that sold the product. That is the design: the importer is the accountable point of contact inside the Union. A vendor assurance is useful evidence that the artefacts exist, and it is also the cheapest thing a vendor can produce. Ask for the artefacts. A provider that has genuinely completed a conformity assessment can send the declaration and instructions the same day, and one that cannot is telling you something about the state of its file.

We only sell low-risk AI tools. Do any of these duties apply?

The heavy verification and retention duties attach to high-risk systems, so a genuinely limited-risk catalogue carries much less. Two cautions. First, classification is not a marketing judgement — a tool sold as productivity software can fall in scope by virtue of where the customer uses it, and the substantial-modification and purpose-change provisions mean your own configuration can move it. Second, transparency obligations for systems that interact with people, generate synthetic content or perform emotion recognition apply regardless of risk tier, and those land on the customer-facing surface you control. Document the classification decision for each product with a date and a reason, because the value of that record is that it shows the question was asked.

Does hosting a customer's deployment make us a distributor or a deployer?

Potentially both, for different systems, and the two roles carry different obligations. If you make a third party's system available to your customer in the course of commercial activity, that looks like distribution. If you use an AI system under your own authority in your own operations — including to run the managed service — you are a deployer of that one, with human-oversight, input-data and monitoring duties of your own. MSPs commonly hold three roles across a single customer account, and the useful exercise is to map them per system rather than per customer. A single answer at the account level is almost always wrong for at least one product in the stack.

How does this interact with an authorised representative?

The authorised representative is the provider's appointee, acting on a written mandate to hold the documentation and be the contact point for the authorities. The importer is a distinct operator in its own commercial chain with its own duties, and appointing a representative does not discharge them. What the representative does change is your verification list: for a non-Union provider, the existence of the appointment is one of the things you are checking. If the vendor cannot name its representative, you have found a gap in the provider's compliance before you have taken on any of the consequences of it.

What is the realistic enforcement exposure for a mid-sized reseller?

Market-surveillance authorities work from complaints, from incidents and from sweeps, and the operator they reach first is the one established in their own jurisdiction — which in a cross-border chain is frequently the importer or distributor rather than the provider. The financial ceilings under the Act are tied to turnover and scale with the nature of the breach, with the highest tier reserved for prohibited practices. But the more probable first contact is not a fine; it is a reasoned request for documentation with a deadline attached. An organisation that can answer it in days has a compliance function. One that discovers at that moment that nobody ever received the declaration of conformity has a commercial problem with its supplier and a regulatory one at the same time.

Start With the White-Label List

Before any documentation exercise, pull every product you sell under your own brand that contains someone else's model. That list is where the role flip happens, and it is usually shorter than people expect and shorter than it should be, because nobody has counted the bundles.

Then work outward: verification artefacts for what you import, retention for what you hold, and an escalation path for what you sell. In that order, because the first one determines whether the other two are even yours to do.