AI Act, Day One: Building and Scaling Under Europe's New Rules — co-hosted by AWS
The EU AI Act is the world's first comprehensive law on artificial intelligence and will take full effect on August 2, 2026.
It sets rules for how AI can be built, sold and used across Europe, from transparency obligations to strict requirements for high-risk systems, with real penalties for getting it wrong. GPAI (general purpose AI) obligations have been in force since 2025, the recent Digital Omnibus reshuffled the high-risk deadlines, and everyone building or deploying AI in Europe is now asking the same question: what does compliance actually look like in practice?
Why this event, why now: the rules just went live, but the playbook has not caught up. Legal teams, engineers, founders and enterprises are all interpreting the same text differently, and the gap between "what the law says" and "what you actually do on Monday" is where most of the confusion lives. We are bringing four people who see that gap from very different angles into one room to talk it through honestly, in front of the Berlin AI community.
This is not a lecture on what the law says. It is a live debate about what it means to ship, scale and compete under it, from four people who see it from very different sides:
Legal view — Dr. Maximilian Vonthien, Counsel at CMS Berlin, advises companies on the EU AI Act, AI governance and copyright, and co-heads CMS's AI Focus Group
AWS view — Alex Tselikov, Sr. Delivery Consultant-AI/ML at AWS, an expert on how to leverage the AWS infra to be compliant with the EU AI Act (read his latest blog article)
StratUp C-level — Dmitry Kharchenko, Serial Entrepreneur, investor, Board Member as CTPO dealing on a daily business with regulations at scale
Moderated by Timo Spring, with plenty of room for your questions.
Who should come: founders, engineers, product and enterprise decision makers, legal and policy people and anyone in the AI community trying to make sense of the new rules. Whether you are AI-curious or deep in the weeds, you will leave with a clearer picture of what actually matters.
As always, food and drink, engaging conversation and incredible company will all be provided!
Agenda
19:00 — Welcome and housekeeping
19:03 — Intro to the AI Collective & AWS
19:06 — Set the stage: the moment of August 2nd
19:10 — Speaker intros
19:16 — Block 1: Where we actually are
19:28 — Block 2: The cost of compliance
19:43 — Block 3: Friction, innovation and Europe's bet
19:58 — Audience Q&A
20:13 — Closing and thanking AWS
20:15 — Networking, food and drinks
Location
Amazon Tower, Warschauer Straße
Bring photo ID for building access.
Hosts
This event is co-hosted by The AI Collective Berlin and AWS (Amazon Web Services), bringing together a grassroots AI community and one of the world's largest cloud and AI providers on a topic that matters to both.
AWS (Amazon Web Services) co-hosts the evening, providing the venue and an enterprise and cloud-provider perspective on building and deploying AI responsibly under the new rules. We are grateful to AWS for partnering with the community to make this event happen.
Please be advised: Unfortunately, space is very limited at these community events and we can not always accept everyone we would like to. If you are not accepted to this event, please keep applying! We appreciate your application tremendously and we are looking forward to seeing you at a future event very soon!
The AI Collective is a global non-profit building the human layer for the AI era. We unite 280,000+ leaders, builders, and stakeholders across 100+ forums worldwide to democratize the frontier, build trust, and coordinate how society navigates the rapid acceleration of technological progress.
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