Article 50 of the EU AI Act sets the transparency duties that apply to AI systems which interact with people or generate content. It is one of the obligations that starts applying on 2 August 2026, and it reaches far more ordinary businesses than the high-risk rules do — any website with an AI chatbot or AI-generated content is in scope.
Who Article 50 applies to
Article 50 binds both providers (those who build and place an AI system on the market) and deployers (those who use one under their own authority). Most companies are deployers: you did not build the chatbot, but you put it on your website, so the user-facing disclosure duty is yours. The obligation follows the actual use, not the size of the company — there is no small-business exemption from the transparency rules.
The four transparency cases
Article 50 has four limbs. (1) AI systems that interact with people must let those people know they are dealing with an AI, unless it is obvious. (2) Providers of generative AI must mark synthetic audio, image, video or text as artificially generated in a machine-readable way. (3) Emotion-recognition and biometric-categorisation systems must inform the people exposed to them. (4) Deployers of deep fakes must disclose that the content is artificially generated or manipulated, and AI-generated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest must be disclosed as such.
The 2 August 2026 deadline
The Article 50 transparency obligations become enforceable on 2 August 2026. After that date a regulator — or a customer running a procurement check — can ask you to show that every AI touchpoint a user meets is disclosed. The practical task is to inventory where AI appears on your site, add the disclosures, and keep dated evidence that you did.