The AI Register: What Regulators Will Ask For First
When the White House signed its AI Executive Order on June 2, 2026, it gave federal agencies 30 days to document every AI system in use. When the EU AI Act enforcement begins on August 2, 2026, Article 11 requires the same thing. When Canada's OSFI, Treasury Board, and Quebec Law 25 guidance land on a financial services desk, they all begin in the same place.
The first question is always the same: what AI are you running?
Not "is it safe?" Not "is it biased?" Not "what did it decide?" Those questions come later. The first question — the one that unlocks every subsequent audit, every risk classification, every governance conversation — is inventory.
What AI systems are deployed in your organization, who is using them, and what is it costing you?
This document has a name. In regulatory language it's called an AI Register, a technical documentation file, or an algorithmic inventory. The name varies by jurisdiction. The requirement does not.
The problem most enterprise IT teams face in June 2026: they don't have one. Not because they haven't tried. Because AI has proliferated faster than procurement. Developers on personal Claude accounts. Teams with unlicensed Copilot seats. Gemini embedded in Workspace nobody provisioned intentionally. AWS Bedrock billing quietly accumulating on a shared service account.
Shadow AI isn't a security problem first. It's an inventory problem. You can't govern what you haven't counted.
The good news: the AI Register isn't a complex document. It's a structured inventory — vendor, plan tier, user assignment, last active date, monthly cost, authorization scope. Five fields per seat across however many vendors your organization runs.
The harder news: assembling it manually, across five vendors with five different billing architectures, updated monthly, is a full-time job. The organizations that will be ready when the auditor's first question arrives are the ones who automated that assembly before the deadline.
Three frameworks. One artifact. The clock is running.
See your organization's AI spend data
PromptKing connects to your AI vendors and surfaces exactly this analysis — for your seats, your vendors, your budget.