The EU AI Act's transparency obligations under Article 50 take full effect on 2 August 2026, creating concrete disclosure duties for providers and deployers of AI systems. The rules are designed to make AI interactions and certain AI-generated or manipulated content more visible to the people who encounter them. For consumer-facing tools, that means chatbot disclosures are no longer merely a product-design choice. For content workflows, labeling can become a compliance requirement, particularly where deepfakes or other manipulated material concerns matters of public interest.
The European Commission's official factsheet on transparency rules for AI systems sets out the core change: people should be clearly informed when they are interacting with an AI system, while specified AI-generated or AI-manipulated content must be marked or labeled. Article 50 is therefore a significant operational milestone for organisations offering AI interfaces, publishing AI-assisted material, or integrating general-purpose AI into customer and content processes.
What Article 50 requires
At its core, Article 50 addresses two different transparency situations. The first is direct interaction with an AI system. Providers and deployers must clearly disclose when a person is communicating with AI, such as through a chatbot, except where the artificial nature of the interaction is obvious from the circumstances and context.
