EU AI Act Templates: Free Documentation Starting Points

The EU AI Act does not ask you to write essays. It asks you to hold records — a risk management system under Article 9, technical documentation under Article 11, logs under Article 12, an incident report under Article 73 when something goes seriously wrong. Most teams stall at the same place: they know the obligation exists, but they do not know what the document is supposed to look like on the page.

This section exists to remove that first blocker. Each template here is a free, structured starting point for one document the Regulation expects — the headings, the fields, the questions you have to answer, and the Article or Annex the document answers to. You copy it, you fill it against your own system, you keep it.

It is for whoever has been handed AI compliance and a blank page: the compliance lead, the product owner, the engineer writing the first honest description of what a model actually does, the founder who needs a policy before a customer's procurement team asks for one.

Which template answers which obligation

The templates are organised around obligations, not around job titles. The mapping is the useful part:

Some templates are not tied to a single Article at all. An AI system register, a vendor questionnaire, a gap analysis, an internal AI policy — none of these are named obligations in the Regulation. They are the working instruments that make the named obligations achievable. You cannot write Annex IV documentation for a system you have not inventoried, and you cannot answer for a third-party model you never asked questions about.

Where to start, honestly

Start with an AI system register, before any policy. Almost every downstream obligation is per-system: classification is per-system, technical documentation is per-system, incident reporting is per-system. Until you know what you have, everything else is guesswork about an unknown denominator.

Then classify. Article 6 and Annex III decide whether the heavy stack applies at all. A minimal-risk internal tool does not need an Annex IV file. Writing one anyway is not caution, it is wasted months. Classification tells you which of these templates are relevant to you and which are not.

Then work outward from the classification. If a system is high-risk, the Article 9 risk register and the Annex IV file are the spine, and everything else hangs off them. If a system only touches Article 50 — a chatbot, generated media, biometric categorisation — a transparency notice may genuinely be the whole of your documentation duty.

Two dates set the pressure. Stand-alone high-risk systems listed in Annex III must comply by 2 December 2027. High-risk AI embedded as a safety component in an Annex I regulated product has until 2 August 2028. Two obligations are already live: Article 5's prohibitions and Article 4's AI literacy duty have applied since 2 February 2025. General Article 50 transparency applies from 2 August 2026, and the Article 50(2) content-marking duty from 2 December 2026 — a different date, frequently conflated with the Annex III one.

What a template can and cannot do

A template is a starting structure. It is not evidence, and it is worth being blunt about the difference.

Annex IV does not ask for a document. It asks for an accurate description of a specific system — its architecture, its training data, its tested performance, its known limitations. A template gives you the section headings for that description. It cannot supply the content, and the content is the entire substance of the obligation. A filled-in template describing a system you do not actually operate is worse than nothing in front of a market surveillance authority.

The deeper limit is time. Article 9 describes the risk management system as a continuous, iterative process across the lifecycle. Article 11 requires the technical documentation to be kept up to date. Article 72 requires monitoring after the system is on the market. A static document goes stale the moment the system changes — a retrained model, a new data source, an expanded intended purpose, and your file now describes something that no longer exists. Under Article 25, a substantial modification can even change who you are: a deployer who materially alters a high-risk system becomes its provider, with the full provider stack attached.

So treat these as scaffolding for a living record, not as a deliverable to be finished. The document is only worth what its accuracy on the day a regulator reads it is worth.

How Confir helps

Confir turns these documents into records that stay current. Guided intake and rule-based auto-classification against Article 6 and Annex III determine which obligations actually apply to each system, then scope the controls to match. The Annex IV technical documentation, the Article 9 risk management record, Article 50 transparency, the EU Declaration of Conformity, Article 72 post-market monitoring and Article 73 incident reporting are generated from your live system data and versioned in an immutable audit log under Article 12. The engine is deterministic and rule-based, and everything is hosted in the EU. The templates below are free to use whether or not you ever use the product.