EU AI Act Article 50: 2026 Compliance Guide for Non-EU Companies

2 August 2026 enforcement, the four obligations, the US state law mosaic, and a 6-step practical compliance checklist.

What Article 50 requires

Article 50 of the EU AI Act is the transparency article. People must know when they are interacting with an AI system, and synthetic content must be machine-readably marked. It applies to providers and deployers of chatbots, generated text, images, audio and video — including deepfakes used in marketing.

The four obligations

Disclose AI interaction at the start of any chatbot conversation, mark generated or manipulated content in a machine-readable format such as C2PA, disclose deepfakes clearly to the audience, and inform people when emotion recognition or biometric categorisation is used.

• Chatbot disclosure before the first exchange
• Machine-readable marking of synthetic media
• Visible deepfake labelling
• Notice for emotion recognition and biometric categorisation

Dates that matter

Article 50 applies from 2 August 2026 under Article 113 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689. Any effect of the Digital Omnibus proposal should be assessed only against a formally adopted and published final text.

How CookieTrace helps

The AI Disclosure Module adds a compliant disclosure layer to chat widgets and AI-generated pages, records the disclosure event in the same signed log used for cookie consent and exports it for audits — so AI transparency and cookie compliance are evidenced from one place.