A teenager opens Instagram at midnight and gets nothing back. Meta's August settlement with 51 state attorneys general wrote that behaviour, along with a two-hour daily cap on teen accounts across Instagram and Facebook [9]. The route was a courtroom rather than a statute [16], and the terms carry $12.19bn over ten years [10], which is about $1.22bn a year [1].
What the two systems hand a product organisation differs in kind. Brussels designated ChatGPT a very large online search engine under the DSA on 31 August, with Reddit and Roblox designated as platforms and four months on the clock for all three [7], putting the date at the end of December [2]. The following day the Commission sent its first AI Act requests for information to more than 30 providers, mostly about safety and copyright according to spokesman Thomas Regnier [8]. Those are calendar items. You can name an owner, book the legal review and answer a questionnaire without touching a single default.
The team inside the AI Office that evaluates frontier models numbers 36 [11]. Against more than 30 questionnaire recipients that is at most a little over one evaluator per company [3], while the American column for the same month shows 51 attorneys general and a settlement in the billions. Virkkunen's reading is that the destinations converge, and on teen defaults she has a case [2]; the arrival times are what a rollout plan actually runs on.
The Carolina Principles give the wait-for-clarity posture a document to cite. Michael Kratsios launched them on 1 September, urging G20 governments not to build new AI rules or regulators and saying policymakers "should not treat every emerging technology as a first-of-its-kind policy problem", per Al Jazeera's account [4][5]. None of that reaches a state attorney general. Virkkunen counts hundreds of rules at state level before anyone gets near a courtroom [6], and the number is her count, not an inventory of which ones touch your surfaces.
Movement runs the other way as well. Brussels agreed in May to thin out the AI Act, pushing high-risk obligations to December 2027 [12], which is part of why Europe's own tech chief can call the gap small.
The sort worth doing has two axes: who sets the date, and what has to change. A document you can produce on a schedule you help set. A default you have to build and ship, and a settlement can name the day it goes live. The quadrant marked "someone else's date, our default" is where Meta's teen features landed, and those are the items to staff as though the deadline already exists. The European work this month sits mostly in the document quadrant, on safety and copyright paperwork [8]. The American work sat in the other one, and it came with an invoice [10]. If a surface touches minors and its protection lives in a policy page rather than in code, the date on that work belongs to whoever files first.
