Article 18: documentation keeping

The amended application dates for Chapter III, Sections 1, 2 and 3, with the exception of Article 6(5), are 2 December 2027 for the standalone Annex III route and 2 August 2028 for high-risk AI in products covered by the Annex I harmonisation legislation.

Four things here are our reading and not the text. First the application date: Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 does not name Article 18 separately, so the fact that this duty moves with 2 December 2027 and 2 August 2028 follows from its placement in Chapter III, Section 3, and not from an explicit provision. Second the starting moment. Paragraph 1 names the placing on the market and the putting into service side by side without choosing, and for a system where both moments occur that is years of difference at the end of the period. Counting from the later moment is the only count that falls short under neither reading, and that is what we would advise a provider. The other reading is defensible: in Union product law the placing on the market is usually the moment that counts, and then the period ends earlier. Third a substantially modified version: the text is silent, and it is equally defensible that every version gets its own period as that the original one continues. Fourth the reach of paragraph 3: it names only the technical documentation, so we keep points (b) to (e) under the general regime until the contrary is settled. Paragraph 2, finally, is addressed to the Member State and not to you. The Netherlands has not yet determined those conditions, so what happens to your file on insolvency or cessation of activity currently follows from contract and not from law.

Watch the boundaries of this duty, because they get crossed in both directions. The automatically generated logs are not among the five components: they fall under Article 19, with its own and much shorter period of at least six months, appropriate to the intended purpose, and with a clause for financial institutions that parallels paragraph 3. So do not stretch the ten years to your logs, and conversely do not settle for six months for your documentation. For a provider established in a third country the actual availability moreover sits with two parties at once: Article 22(3)(b) requires the authorised representative to keep, for ten years, the contact details of the provider, a copy of the EU declaration of conformity, the technical documentation and, if applicable, the certificate issued by the notified body at the disposal of the competent authorities and of the bodies referred to in Article 74(10). Two files that drift apart are worse than one. Point (e) overlaps with Article 47(1), which gives the declaration of conformity its own ten year period, and under Article 23(5) the importer carries ten years again for the certificate, the instructions for use and the declaration of conformity. That overlap is no reason to drop one of the periods: they are independent duties of different parties. It is a reason to choose a place of retention where they coincide. On the GDPR, finally: a retention duty under Union law is itself a ground under Article 6(1)(c) GDPR, and the storage limitation of Article 5(1)(e) permits retention that the law requires. The question is therefore not whether it is allowed but how far it reaches. Ten years applies to what Article 18(1) names, and not to everything created along the way: separate test sets, log samples and raw data dumps from the documentation you must be able to produce.

This is the duty that asks nothing at the moment you take it on and everything at the moment you have forgotten it. Ten years is longer than the average life of a supplier contract, a document management system and a product team. In the organisations where we encounter this, the five components rarely sit in one archive: the quality system sits with compliance, the notified body decisions with certification, the declaration of conformity with legal. That is not law, but it is common enough that it is worth checking before you assume your situation is different. Whoever first assembles the documents when an authority asks discovers that retention in fact depended on a person and not on a process. Note also the side that is not about you: paragraph 2 concerns the situation where the provider or its representative goes bankrupt, and that is exactly the risk you run as a customer of a small supplier. It is a contracting question before it becomes a compliance question.