EU AI Act Enforcement Goes Live: The Transparency Rules Take Effect
On August 2, 2026 the EU AI Act entered its enforcement phase: chatbots must disclose they are AI, and synthetic media needs visible plus machine-readable labels. Meta declined to sign the new code.
What happened
On August 2, 2026 the European Union's AI Act moved from paper to practice. The European Commission's AI Office and national authorities gained the power to investigate general-purpose AI providers, demand technical changes and impose fines of up to €15 million or 3% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.
What companies must do now
Article 50 applies from the same day. Interactive AI systems must tell users they are not talking to a human, and AI-generated or edited images, video and audio need visible labels plus machine-readable markers. Systems already on the market before August 2 keep a grace period for machine-readable marking until December 2, 2026; anything launched afterwards has no transition period.
More than 180 organisations signed the Commission's first Code of Conduct on AI-Generated Content Transparency, announced on July 31 — Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic, Mistral AI and IBM among them. Meta declined to join.
What was postponed
Not everything arrived at once. Under the Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, high-risk obligations were deferred: standalone high-risk systems to December 2, 2027, and high-risk AI embedded in regulated products to August 2, 2028. California's AI Transparency Act advanced on the same day, so labelling is no longer only a European question.
For agencies and product teams the practical takeaway is a checklist: know which of your outputs are synthetic, disclose them, and keep provenance records you can hand to an auditor.