European UnionAI Act, Article 50 (transparency obligations for AI systems and synthetic content)
Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Article 50
In force since .
Amended by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, which added a transition period to for the Article 50(2) marking duty on a generative system placed on the market before .
An AI transparency rule binding public and private bodies.
- How the hook was established
- express
- What makes it apply
- Market targeting, Operator establishment, Place of effect
- Obligation class
- Content labelling, Disclosure
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- If you are a provider of an AI system intended to interact directly with natural persons, design and develop it so that the people it interacts with are informed that they are interacting with an AI system, unless that is obvious to a reasonably well-informed, observant and circumspect person, taking into account the circumstances and the context of use (Article 50(1)). This does not apply to an AI system authorized by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offenses, subject to appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms of third parties, unless the system is available for the public to report a criminal offense.
- If you are a provider of an AI system, including a general-purpose AI system, that generates synthetic audio, image, video or text content, ensure that its outputs are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated, using technical solutions that are effective, interoperable, robust and reliable as far as technically feasible, taking into account the specificities and limitations of various types of content, the costs of implementation and the generally acknowledged state of the art (Article 50(2)). This marking duty is the provider's; a deployer's disclosure duties are in Article 50(3) and (4). It does not apply to the extent the system performs an assistive function for standard editing or does not substantially alter the input data the deployer provided or its semantics, or where authorized by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offenses.
- If you are a provider of an AI system that generates synthetic audio, image, video or text content and was placed on the market before , take the necessary steps to comply with the Article 50(2) marking duty by (Article 111(4), inserted by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744).
- If you are a deployer of an emotion recognition system or a biometric categorisation system, inform the natural persons exposed to it of the operation of the system, and process their personal data in accordance with Regulations (EU) 2016/679 and (EU) 2018/1725 and Directive (EU) 2016/680, as applicable (Article 50(3)). This does not apply to an AI system used for biometric categorisation and emotion recognition that is permitted by law to detect, prevent or investigate criminal offenses, subject to appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms of third parties and in accordance with Union law.
- If you are a deployer of an AI system that generates or manipulates image, audio or video content constituting a deep fake, disclose that the content has been artificially generated or manipulated (Article 50(4)). A deep fake is AI-generated or manipulated image, audio or video content that resembles existing persons, objects, places, entities or events and would falsely appear to a person to be authentic or truthful (Article 3, point (60)). Where the content forms part of an evidently artistic, creative, satirical, fictional or analogous work or programme, the disclosure is limited to the existence of the generated or manipulated content, in an appropriate manner that does not hamper the display or enjoyment of the work. This does not apply where the use is authorized by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offenses.
- If you are a deployer of an AI system that generates or manipulates text that is published with the purpose of informing the public on matters of public interest, disclose that the text has been artificially generated or manipulated (Article 50(4)). This does not apply where the use is authorized by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offenses, or where the AI-generated content has undergone a process of human review or editorial control and a natural or legal person holds editorial responsibility for the publication of the content.
- If you owe the information required by Article 50(1) to (4), provide it to the natural persons concerned in a clear and distinguishable manner at the latest at the time of the first interaction or exposure, in a form that conforms to the applicable accessibility requirements (Article 50(5)).
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text. Also read by: European Commission Guidelines on the implementation of the transparency obligations for certain AI systems under Article 50 of the AI Act (guidance from the European Commission); European Commission (guidance, recorded ).
In the frameworks
- NIST AI RMF
- MEASURE 2.8Risks associated with transparency and accountability – as identified in the MAP function – are examined and documented.
- NIST AI 600-1
- GAI-RISK-07Human-AI Configuration
- GAI-RISK-08Information Integrity
- OWASP Agentic Top 10
- ASI09Human-Agent Trust Exploitation
- MIT mitigations Draft
- NIST Privacy Framework
- CM.AW-P1Mechanisms (e.g., notices, internal or public reports) for communicating data processing purposes, practices, associated privacy risks, and options for enabling individuals’ data processing preferences and requests are established and in place.
- FINOS AIGF
- AIR-DET-021Agent Decision Audit and Explainability
- ETSI EN 304 223
Our reading of where this law's duties sit in each framework. It never says that running a control meets the law. How we read a framework against the law
Identifiers refer to ETSI EN 304 223 V2.1.1 (2025-12), © ETSI 2025, all rights reserved. ETSI owns the standard; no ETSI text (titles or sentences) is reproduced here. The standard is free to download from ETSI.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureNo
Private right of actionNo
Penalty structure
Article 99(4)(g): non-compliance with the Article 50 transparency obligations is fined up to EUR 15,000,000 or 3% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. Article 99(6) requires the lower of the two amounts for an SME, including a start-up; Article 99(6a), inserted by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, gives the same lower-of treatment to a small mid-cap enterprise, since both apply to paragraph 4 fines.
- Rule
- Lower of for SME
- As of
- Currency
- EUR
- Fixed cap
- 15,000,000
- Turnover percentage cap
- 3
Who enforces it
Enforcement body
National market surveillance authorities, at least one designated by each Member State under Article 70; the AI Office for an AI system within its exclusive competence under Article 75(1); the European Data Protection Supervisor for Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies within the Regulation's scope, except the Court of Justice acting in its judicial capacity (Article 74(9)).
Enforcement record
Article 50 is enforced by each Member State's own national market surveillance authority designated under Article 70(1), and by the AI Office for an AI system within its exclusive competence under Article 75(1), so no single body publishes a register to read a Union-level count from. The AI Office's own site, including its 'Latest News' list (current to ), names no aggregation of the national authorities' Article 50 actions, and no Commission report of that kind exists yet. No count of actions per year is published across the Member States: enforcement is spread across the national authorities and the AI Office and is uncounted at Union level. Article 113 sets the general application date for Article 50, and with it the Article 99(4)(g) fine for non-compliance, at , so the window in which any national authority could have enforced runs to under two months as of .
- As of
- Source link
- https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/ai-office
Settledness
The Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content, at https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-ai-generated-content, was drawn up by independent experts in a multi-stakeholder process facilitated by the AI Office, and its final text was published with the closing plenary of . The Commission's page for the Code says adherence to it is voluntary and that the Article 50 obligations are legal obligations.
- As of
- Guidance link
- https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/guidelines-transparency-obligations-providers-and-deployers-ai-systems
- Guidance body
- European Commission
- Open questions
- Does Article 111(4), which has a provider of a generative AI system placed on the market before comply with Article 50(2) by , reach a new version of that system that is placed on the market after ?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Article 50 requires providers to mark AI-generated output and to tell people they are dealing with an AI system at the point of interaction or exposure. It states no duty to create, keep, or later produce a log or record of that marking or disclosure.
- Kind
- None
- As of
Also on the record
Setting the rule reaches
General
EEA status
- Status
- Pending
- Source link
- https://www.efta.int/eea-lex/32024r1689
What this law does
Providers of AI systems that interact directly with people must ensure users are informed they are dealing with an AI system unless obvious from context, and providers of generative AI must mark synthetic audio, image, video, or text output in a machine-readable, detectable format.
Deployers of emotion-recognition or biometric-categorization systems must inform exposed individuals, and deployers of deepfakes or AI-generated public-interest text must disclose the artificial origin unless the content underwent human review with editorial responsibility. The Article reaches providers and deployers outside the EU whose system's output is used in the EU.
A four-month transition, to , applies only to the machine-readable marking sub-duty for generative systems already on the market before , added by the Digital Omnibus on AI.
Guidance on this law
How the bodies that enforce this law read it. Guidance binds nobody by itself, so LexLint never raises a finding from it; the duty is this law's.
- European Commission Guidelines on the implementation of the transparency obligations for certain AI systems under Article 50 of the AI Act, the European Commission
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app generates content with AI, generates text with AI, generates images with AI, generates video with AI, generates audio with AI or deploys a chatbot.
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