The EU's AI transparency rules go live on 2nd Aug’26
On 2nd Aug’26 the EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency duties become binding across all 27 member states. Any chatbot has to tell people they're talking to a machine, at or before the first message, and anything a generative model puts out i.e. text, image, audio, video has to be marked, machine-readably, as AI-made. The high-risk obligations everyone was bracing for got pushed back to December 2027 under the Digital Omnibus amendments. Fines could run to €15M or 3% of global turnover.
What it actually means
For a month the question here has been which model to rent. This deadline doesn't care which model you picked, it cares what you tell people about it. Deliver anything into the EU that talks to users or generates content and you've got about two weeks to get two things right: a clear 'you're talking to AI' at the start of a conversation, and machine-readable labelling on generated output. It's a disclosure line and a label. Do the cheap version now, because the expensive version is a 3%-of-turnover fine for letting the machine pass as a person.
The scary part of the AI Act got delayed.
Source: EU Artificial Intelligence Act · Monday 20 July 2026