EU AI Office Begins Enforcing the AI Act's Transparency Rules

The European Commission's AI Office and national authorities began enforcing the EU AI Act's transparency obligations on August 2, 2026. Under Article 50, chatbot and AI-generated-content providers must tell users they are interacting with AI and embed machine-readable marks in synthetic text, images, audio and video. The AI Office can fine general-purpose AI model violations up to 3% of global annual turnover. Systems already on the market before May 7, 2026 get a grace period until December 2, 2026 for the marking requirement. More than 180 organizations — including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI — signed the related Code of Practice on transparency, while Meta declined. High-risk obligations under the Digital Omnibus were deferred to December 2027.