Operationalizing the EU AI Act Through Continuous Behavioral Monitoring: A Lifecycle Approach to Agentic AI Compliance

The European Union Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act) represents the most comprehensive attempt to regulate artificial intelligence systems to date, introducing obligations for risk management, human oversight, transparency, and post-market monitoring. While the Act is often discussed in terms of pre-deployment conformity assessments, this paper argues that static compliance mechanisms are insufficient for governing autonomous, agentic AI systems whose risks emerge dynamically during operation. We propose a continuous behavioral monitoring approach as a practical mechanism for operationalizing EU AI Act requirements across the AI lifecycle. By mapping regulatory obligations to runtime oversight functions—telemetry collection, behavioral evaluation, policy enforcement, and audit evidence capture—this paper demonstrates how compliance can be transformed from a documentation exercise into an ongoing operational process.