Article 99 — penalties Law
The penalties article, which contains an inversion most summaries get backwards — and one number this site refuses to publish until it has been checked against the operative text.
Article 99 — penalties
Operative text not reproduced here — see the note above. Read it in the vault, where it was parsed from Formex XML and hash-verified, or at the authority.
The SME inversion
For most undertakings the fine is the higher of the fixed sum or the percentage. For small and medium enterprises and start-ups it is the lower of the two.
This is the detail worth knowing about Article 99, and it is the one that survives being summarised badly least often. The general rule maximises exposure; the SME rule caps it. A reader who has absorbed “the higher of” from a headline and then applies it to a small company will overstate that company's exposure — sometimes by a great deal — and overstating exposure to a regulator's penalties is not a harmless error.
It also illustrates why penalty provisions are worth modelling as nodes rather than summarising as a table: the rule is conditional on a property of the addressee, and a table has nowhere to put that condition except a footnote.
The number this page will not print
So it is not used anywhere external, including here. This is the smallest possible demonstration of the site's own standard, applied at its own expense: a number that cannot be recomputed or re-derived does not appear, even when leaving it out makes the page less useful. Computed, not claimed →
Resolving it is one line of work — read Article 99 in the operative text and record which figure is correct, with the retrieval record. It is on the task board, and it is the first thing the re-derivation pass should settle because it is the number most likely to be quoted out of this site.
Why penalties belong in the graph at all
Not to compute exposure — this site does not output numbers about your organisation. They belong in the graph because a penalty provision is the strongest evidence of what an instrument actually prioritises. Which obligations carry the top tier, which carry the middle, and which carry none is a structural fact about the Act that is invisible if you read it article by article and obvious the moment the penalties are edges rather than an appendix.
Crosswalk edges
No bridge attaches to this provision, in either direction. Why there are none, and what has to be true before there are →
Citing this provision
https://standards.sgit.ai/eu-ai-act/provisions/art-099.html positional hash: 954173f1b7696d1e (sha256 of "eu-ai-act/art-099", first 16 hex)
The positional hash is the canonical identity; the alias is a projection of it. If the Act renumbers, the alias moves and the hash does not — which is what lets a crosswalk drawn today survive a consolidation. The scheme →