When Brussels Meets the Blackboard: How the EU AI Act Shapes My AI Teaching in Germany

Sunday Reflection — 2026-10-25

This week, I had to drop a language model demo from my lesson plan because I couldn’t get a straight answer on whether the dataset it used was “high risk” under the new EU AI Act. The official guidance reads like instructions written by committee — definitions that change depending on which annex you land on, tasks that shift from “must” to “should” if you dig deep enough. One sentence to the next and I’m either breaking the law or giving students a watered-down lecture on “AI in theory” instead of letting them build something real. I’ve built bridges on less muddy ground.

mermaid flowchart LR A[Teaching Plan] --> B[Check Act Definitions] B --> C{Dataset Allowed?} C -- Yes --> D[Demo as Planned] C -- No/Unsure --> E[Modify or Drop Demo] E --> F[Student Questions] D --> F

Last Thursday, halfway through a generative AI workshop, one of my sharper students stopped me cold: “Are we even allowed to use this data under the new regulations?” Thirty eyes on me. Nobody in Brussels answers when you need them. I gave my honest answer—“I don’t know, and neither does anyone else right now”—and we spent ten minutes picking apart which uses count as prohibited, which fall under research, and which would need forms nobody in the room could find. In the British Army, if the minefield is too vague to map, you don’t move until someone has a better plan. But in a Berlin classroom, the clock keeps ticking even if the rules aren’t clear.

I’m seeing real changes in how I teach. Some students come in already wary; others get more hesitant the more we talk about the legal grey areas. Nobody wants to be the test case when the fines start. What used to be a technical decision is now a legal calculation. The rest of the world hears “AI risk management” and thinks of banks and driverless cars. For teachers like me, it’s lesson plans and GitHub repos—week to week, nothing abstract about it. The new regulations aren’t stopping classroom AI, but they’re changing its shape, sometimes in ways the policymakers never see coming.

The lesson I’m sitting with: if the law can’t keep up with the pace of teaching, you end up choosing between the best class you can give and the safest class you can give. And some weeks, it’s not much of a choice at all.