The EU AI Act transparency rules take effect on 2 August 2026

On 2 August 2026, just over a month from now, the transparency obligations in Article 50 of the EU AI Act start to apply across the EU. If you run a chatbot, generate marketing copy or images with AI, or use it to talk to customers, this is the deadline that touches you first.

What Article 50 actually requires

• Tell people when they are interacting with an AI system, such as a chatbot or voice assistant, unless that is already obvious from the context.
• Mark AI-generated or AI-manipulated content, including text, images, audio and video such as deepfakes, as artificially generated in a machine-readable way.
• Inform the people exposed to an emotion-recognition or biometric-categorisation system that it is in use.

Why this date still stands

A political agreement reached on 7 May 2026, known as the digital omnibus, postponed the AI Act high-risk obligations. Stand-alone high-risk systems in Annex III now have until 2 December 2027, and AI built into regulated products under Annex I until 2 August 2028. The Article 50 transparency rules were left on their original date of 2 August 2026. A four-month grace period for systems already on the market has been proposed for some Article 50 cases, but the start date itself has not moved.

What to do before then

• Add a clear "you are talking to an AI" line to any chatbot or assistant you run.
• Label anything your tools generate, copy, images or audio, as AI-generated.
• Write the notice once and reuse it everywhere it applies.

You do not need a lawyer to draft the basic disclosure. Our free transparency-notice generator writes one you can paste into a chatbot, a footer or a content credit, tied to the categories Article 50 names.