Article 57: AI regulatory sandboxes

Article 57(1) requires Member States to ensure that their competent authorities establish at least one AI regulatory sandbox at national level. The text of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 as published in the Official Journal provides that the sandbox shall be operational by 2 August 2026, and that wording still stands unchanged on 9 August 2026 in the article text published by the European Commission. The timeline the European Commission publishes after the Digital Omnibus, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, entered into force on 27 July 2026 places the milestone at 2 August 2027 instead, stating "Member States should have at least one AI regulatory sandbox per country operational". The consolidated text of Article 57(1) after the Omnibus has not been verified at article level; rely on the consolidated version on EUR-Lex for the exact date. Chapter VI, which contains Article 57, is not among the exceptions in Article 113 and therefore applies since 2 August 2026. Article 57(1) further provides that the obligation may also be fulfilled by participating in an existing sandbox, in so far as that participation provides an equivalent level of national coverage. Article 57(5) defines the sandbox as a controlled environment that fosters innovation and facilitates the development, training, testing and validation of innovative AI systems for a limited time, pursuant to a specific sandbox plan agreed between the provider or prospective provider and the competent authority, before the system is placed on the market or put into service. Such sandboxes may include testing in real world conditions supervised therein. Article 57(15) requires the AI Office to make publicly available, and keep up to date, a list of planned and existing sandboxes.

The common mistake is to read the sandbox as a delay or an exemption. It is neither. Article 57(11) leaves the competent authority's supervisory and corrective powers fully intact and expressly empowers it to suspend your testing or your participation, temporarily or permanently, where risks cannot be effectively mitigated. A sandbox is useful for exactly one profile: you are building an AI system that is likely to fall under Annex III, you are uncertain about its classification or about how to meet Chapter III, Section 2, and you want that uncertainty resolved before you go to market. If you are purely a deployer buying a system, the sandbox is not your route: at most you can join as a partner of the provider under Article 58(2), point (b). Second trap: 2 August 2027 is a duty on the Member State, not on you. The date on this item is therefore 2 August 2026: from that moment Chapter VI applies and the route is open to you. You cannot hang your own preparation on that date, and the date says nothing about whether your national sandbox will actually have capacity by then. Third trap: people confuse the Article 57 sandbox with Article 60 real-world testing. These are two distinct routes with different conditions. Real-world testing can take place inside the sandbox (Article 57(5) and Article 58(4)) or outside it under Article 60, and the safeguards differ.