EU AI Act Art. 26(6): deployer retention of automatically generated logs

Deployers keep the logs under their control for a period appropriate to the intended purpose, at least six months unless other law provides otherwise

By Jorge García Aibar Reviewed 2026-09-24

From clause to evidence Build the artefact, then file every output it produces as a record that names AIGE-OBL-EUAIA-ART26-6. Drawn from chapter 08.

Text alternative

Clause: EU AI Act, Art. 26.
Duty holder: Deployer.
Applies from: 2027-12-02, Deferred.
Artefact: Retention-as-code schedule.
Layers: Layer 04, Layer 05.
Evidence record: AI incident record, +7 more.
Record schemas: AI incident record , Deployment decision record , Vendor due-diligence response , Agent register entry , AI system register entry , Training record , Instructions for use , Decommissioning runbook .
No crosswalk topic files this clause yet.

Id

AIGE-OBL-EUAIA-ART26-6

Instrument

EU AI Act (post-Omnibus) law

Compared side by side

ISO 42001 vs EU AI Act · NIST AI RMF vs EU AI Act

Clause

Art. 26(6)

Duty holder

Deployer

Authority

National MSA

Applies from

2027-12-02 Deferred · Annex III

Later dates

2028-08-02 Applies to Annex I embedded (product safety-component) systems
2030-08-02 Deadline for legacy high-risk systems intended for use by public authorities (Art. 111(2))

System class

High-risk (Annex III) · High-risk (Annex I)

The artefact that evidences it

Retention-as-code schedule; tamper-evident log store; legal hold while an incident is open.

Patterns that build it

Vendor / Model Due-Diligence Gate (layer 2 and 5)
Explanation Artefact (layer 4 and 5)
Decision Notice & Contest Path (layer 4 and 5)
Rights Requests Against Models (layer 2 and 5)
Staged Rollout with Rollback Criteria (layer 4)
Drift & Fairness Monitor (layer 4 and 5)
Disclosure & Notification Pipeline (layer 5 and 2)
Deactivation, Localisation & Retirement Runbook (layer 4 and 2)

Open controls that evidence it

Draft controls in the open control profiles that map to this row: each states a requirement and the evidence it must leave behind.

AIGE-CTL-EVAL-007 Incident Evidence Preservation (Evaluation environment profile)
AIGE-CTL-DEPLOY-010 Deployer log retention (Deployment and monitoring profile)

Source

Chapter 08, section EU AI Act, post-Omnibus, checked against its sources on the review date above.

Machine-readable

This obligation: /api/v1/obligations/aige-obl-euaia-art26-6.json
The register: /api/v1/obligations.json · CSV
Schema and stability promise: open data and API

Cite this obligation

García Aibar, J. (2026). EU AI Act Art. 26(6): deployer retention of automatically generated logs (AIGE-OBL-EUAIA-ART26-6). In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/obligations/aige-obl-euaia-art26-6. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026obligation,
  author       = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title        = {{EU AI Act Art. 26(6): deployer retention of automatically generated logs (AIGE-OBL-EUAIA-ART26-6)}},
  howpublished = {In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge},
  year         = {2026},
  version      = {0.5.0},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url          = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/obligations/aige-obl-euaia-art26-6},
  note         = {Version 0.5.0}
}