The EU AI Act's penalty provisions are legally active but operationally hollow — cited in compliance briefings as evidence of regulatory force while no body in nineteen jurisdictions holds the authority to issue them. That gap is not a temporary condition pending routine administrative setup. The staggered implementation timeline, designed to allow member states to phase in obligations gradually, instead gave smaller economies permission to defer institutional investment indefinitely. The result is a regulation whose teeth exist in the text and nowhere else. The enterprises that priced EU AI Act…