On July 20, 2026, the European Commission published the final version of its Guidelines on the transparency obligations for providers and deployers of certain AI systems under Article 50 of the EU AI Act. The guidelines arrive less than two weeks before those obligations begin to apply on August 2, 2026, converting the draft that went through consultation in May and June into the Commission’s settled interpretive position.
Article 50 is the AI Act’s disclosure layer. Providers must tell people when they are interacting with an AI system such as a chatbot and must mark AI-generated audio, image, video, and text so synthetic content can be detected. Deployers must disclose deepfakes and AI-generated material on matters of public interest, and must inform people subject to emotion-recognition or biometric-categorization systems. The final guidelines give practical guidance to national competent authorities as well as providers and deployers, with the stated aim of consistent, effective, proportionate, and uniform compliance across member states, and they sit alongside the Commission’s related Code of Practice on transparency of AI-generated content.
The guidelines are formally non-binding - only the Court of Justice of the EU can authoritatively interpret the AI Act - but in practice national market surveillance authorities and the AI Office can be expected to follow them. Notably, while the EU’s Digital Omnibus package deferred the AI Act’s high-risk regime into 2027-2028, the August 2, 2026 transparency date held. Any business shipping a chatbot, generator, or deepfake-capable tool into the EU now has its final compliance playbook, and essentially no runway left to implement it.