Galleries and anti-money laundering: What the 6amld changes in practice in 2026

01From the 5AMLD to the AMLR: why previous directives fell short

To understand what 2026 actually changes, one must go back to 2018. The Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (5AMLD) was the first to explicitly include art dealers among "obliged entities" — the professionals subject to AML requirements. A threshold of 10,000 euros per transaction triggered a customer due diligence obligation: identity verification, risk assessment, and suspicious transaction reporting where necessary.

The problem? The 5AMLD was a directive, not a regulation. Each member state had to transpose it into national law, which produced 27 slightly different versions of the same rule. Some countries, such as the Netherlands and France, transposed it quickly and strictly. Others, like Malta and Luxembourg, procrastinated or watered down the text. The result: a dealer based in Luxembourg operated under an AML regime that was objectively less demanding than that of a counterpart in Paris, creating what legal experts call "regulatory arbitrage" — the ability to choose one's jurisdiction based on its permissiveness.

The 6AMLD, and above all the AMLR — Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 that accompanies it, break with this logic entirely. A European regulation applies directly in all member states, without national transposition. From 2026 onward, there will no longer be 27 AML regimes in Europe: there will be only one.

02The AMLA: a central authority that changes the nature of oversight

The creation of the AMLA — the European Authority for Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism, whose headquarters was awarded to Frankfurt in November 2023 — represents what is probably the most significant structural change for art market participants in decades. Operational from 2025, this agency will have the power to directly supervise entities it considers "high risk" in the most exposed sectors.

In concrete terms, the major auction houses — Christie's, Sotheby's, Phillips — and potentially galleries whose turnover or transaction profile places them in a high-risk category could find themselves under direct surveillance from Frankfurt, rather than solely under that of their national regulator. The AMLA will have access to client files, will be able to conduct inspections and impose sanctions without going through member states.

For Sotheby's, which received a fine of 6.6 million pounds sterling from the British Financial Conduct Authority in 2023 for AML failings linked to Russian clients — including transactions involving works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francis Bacon — this centralization is no theoretical abstraction. It is a layer of supervision added on top of existing national regulators, with resources and transnational coordination that those regulators have never had.

03What "beneficial owner" really means for a gallery

One of the most technical — and most burdensome — obligations introduced by the AMLR concerns the identification of the beneficial owner. When a company purchases a work for 80,000 euros at your gallery, you can no longer simply verify the identity of the legal representative who signs the cheque. You must trace the ownership chain all the way up to identify the natural person or persons who actually control that entity — generally defined as anyone holding more than 25% of the voting rights or capital.

For a family gallery whose administrative team amounts to two or three people, this obligation represents a genuine burden. It requires access to national beneficial ownership registers — now interconnected via the BORIS system (Beneficial Ownership Registers Interconnection System) — and the ability to interpret their data, which is sometimes incomplete or in foreign languages.

The situation becomes still more complicated when the buyer is a fiduciary structure such as a trust or a family foundation. Anglo-Saxon trusts, widely used by wealthy collectors, present a structural opacity that beneficial ownership registers cannot always penetrate. The AMLR obliges galleries to exercise enhanced due diligence in such cases — documenting the steps taken, preserving evidence, and deciding whether the residual risk justifies refusing the transaction.

04The risk zones that 2026 makes uncomfortable: freeports, NFTs and private sales

Three areas of the art market deserve particular attention under the new regulation, as they combine significant financial volumes with an opacity that has traditionally been tolerated.

Freeports — those warehouses with special customs status where works of art can be stored, traded and even exhibited without ever officially "entering" a fiscal territory — have long constituted a blind spot in AML regulation. The Geneva freeport housed, according to a Guardian investigation published in 2016, approximately 1.2 million works of art with an estimated value of over 100 billion dollars. While Swiss freeports remain outside the scope of the AMLR (Switzerland not being an EU member), their Luxembourg equivalents and Belgian bonded warehouses do fall under the new regulation. Transactions passing through them will now have to meet the same due diligence obligations as any gallery sale.

NFTs (non-fungible tokens) make their explicit entry into the AMLR text as a category of assets liable to be used for money laundering purposes. This comes as no surprise: in 2022, a Chainalysis study documented wash trading operations on NFTs — repeated sales of the same asset between related entities to artificially inflate its value — amounting to several hundred million dollars. Galleries that have incorporated NFT sales into their activity will need to treat these transactions in exactly the same way as sales of physical works.

Private sales, finally — which accounted for approximately 50% of the global market by value according to the Art Basel/UBS Report 2023 — are precisely the channel most difficult to monitor. And yet they present the highest risk profiles: no public price, no transparent bidding, often multiple intermediaries. The 6AMLD does not prohibit them, but it requires galleries to apply due diligence at least equivalent to that applied to public transactions.

05The criminal liability of "professional enablers": a development that is causing alarm

One of the most discussed — and most controversial — aspects of the 6AMLD is the extension of criminal liability to "professional enablers": lawyers, accountants, art advisers and other intermediaries who knowingly or negligently facilitate transactions that may constitute money laundering.

This provision goes further than what the 5AMLD provided for. It establishes the principle that wilful blindness — "I didn't know" used as a shield by intermediaries who had carefully refrained from asking the right questions — no longer constitutes an acceptable defence. An art adviser who structures the acquisition of a collection for a client whose risk profile should have alerted any diligent professional can be prosecuted, even if they did not personally participate in the laundering operation.

For the major galleries that have developed teams of advisers buying on behalf of clients — a common model at Pace Gallery, Hauser & Wirth and Gagosian — this provision demands a formalisation of verification procedures whose absence could now engage not only the liability of the legal entity, but that of the individuals who represent it.

06What this costs in practice: the question of resources for independent galleries

The question that no one wants to raise officially, but that every mid-sized gallery is asking, is straightforward: how much is all of this going to cost? A 2023 survey conducted by TEFAF (The European Fine Art Foundation) among its members estimated that AML compliance already represented between 15,000 and 40,000 euros per year for a medium-sized gallery, combining software costs, staff training and administrative time. The AMLR, with its enhanced requirements, is expected to push that figure higher.

Technology platforms specialising in AML compliance for the art market — such as ArtAML (launched in London in 2020), or the art modules of Dow Jones Risk & Compliance — automate part of the work: screening against international sanctions databases, checking lists of politically exposed persons (PEPs), and automatically generating the required documentation. Their annual subscription runs between 3,000 and 15,000 euros depending on functionality, which remains accessible for established galleries but represents a substantial outlay for operations with fewer than five employees.

Art Basel has had mandatory AML checks in place for its exhibitors since 2023 — a first in the art fair industry. Galleries wishing to exhibit in Basel, Miami or Paris must now demonstrate the existence of a documented AML programme. This is less an additional burden than an opportunity: galleries that have invested in compliance before 2026 are positioning themselves advantageously at fairs and with institutional collectors, who are themselves subject to due diligence obligations on their acquisitions.

07What galleries need to anticipate before full implementation

The AMLR will enter into full application during 2026, with staggered deadlines depending on the type of obligation. The AMLA will publish sector-specific guidelines for the art market by the end of 2025 — a document awaited with keen interest by professionals, as the current legislative texts still leave considerable room for interpretation on practical points such as the treatment of long-term consignments or the verification of heirs in estates that include works of art.

What is already certain: any gallery that has not, by 2026, formalised its AML policy in writing, appointed a compliance officer (even on a part-time basis), and put in place a documented client verification process, is exposed to administrative sanctions from national regulators — who remain the first line of enforcement for entities not directly supervised by the AMLA.

The transparency that the 6AMLD imposes is not simply a regulatory constraint: it is a profound transformation of the culture of the art market, a sector that has long operated on discretion as a cardinal value. The relationship between a gallerist and their client rests on trust, confidentiality, and sometimes secrecy. What 2026 asks is not that these values be abandoned, but that they be reconciled with a requirement for traceability that, in the end, protects both the market and the honest actors who sustain it.