Article 50: already enforceable.

Article 50 is the part of the EU AI Act that is already enforceable. Since 2 August 2026, national authorities have had fining powers over it. It was not touched by the June 2026 Omnibus - while high-risk obligations slid to December 2027, transparency did not move a day. The one exception is machine-readable marking under 50(2), which applies from 2 December 2026. If you ship a chatbot, a generative feature, or anything that produces synthetic media, this is the article that applies to you now.

Most teams reading about the "AI Act delay" concluded they had until 2027. For Article 50 duties, that is wrong by sixteen months.

The four duties

Article 50 imposes disclosure, not conformity assessment. There is no notified body, no CE marking, no technical file. The obligations are small - which is exactly why failing them is hard to excuse.

Where teams actually fail this

Disclosure buried in the privacy policy. The duty is to inform the person interacting with the system, at the point of interaction. A line in a policy document nobody opens does not discharge it. The bot's greeting does.

"It's obvious it's a bot." The exemption in 50(1) is for cases obvious to a reasonably well-informed, observant and circumspect person. A widget named "Ask Ava" with a human avatar is not that. If your product design works hard to feel human, you have argued yourself out of the exemption.

Assuming the model vendor handles 50(2). Machine-readable marking of synthetic output is a provider duty. If you call OpenAI's or Anthropic's API, the marking obligation for the underlying model output generally sits with them - but if you generate, assemble or re-encode media yourself, check rather than assume. Where the provider line sits.

Emotion recognition in the workplace. 50(3) requires disclosure - but in employment and education contexts, emotion inference is prohibited outright under Article 5, not merely disclosable. Disclosure does not cure a prohibited practice.

What compliance looks like in practice

• One sentence in your chatbot's opening message: this is an AI assistant.
• A visible label on generated media in your UI, plus whatever provenance metadata your generation stack supports.
• A dated note in your compliance file recording which systems you assessed under Article 50 and what you concluded - including the ones you decided were exempt, and why.
• An Article 4 AI-literacy session minuted, since that is live too.

For the exact words and where to put them, see Article 50 disclosure templates and examples, or fill them in for your product with the free Article 50 disclosure generator.

That is a morning's work. The reason to do it this week rather than next quarter is that this is the one part of the Act with active enforcement powers and no grace period left.

What it costs to get wrong

Article 50 breaches fall under Article 99(4): up to €15,000,000 or 3% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher - or, if you are an SME or start-up, whichever is lower. The full fine structure.

Article 50 does not make your system high-risk. A chatbot with disclosure duties is a Limited Risk system, and the Chapter III obligations that everyone fears do not attach to it. If you want to know which side of that line you are on, the chatbot guide works through it.

Frequently asked questions

Is Article 50 of the EU AI Act in force?

Yes. Article 50 transparency duties applied and became enforceable on 2 August 2026, when national authorities gained their fining powers. The June 2026 Omnibus deferred high-risk obligations to December 2027 but did not defer Article 50.

What are the four Article 50 duties?

Article 50(1) requires providers to tell people they are interacting with an AI system unless it is obvious. 50(2) requires machine-readable marking of AI-generated audio, image, video or text. 50(3) requires deployers of emotion recognition or biometric categorisation to inform exposed persons. 50(4) requires deployers to disclose deepfakes and certain artificially generated public-interest text.

Is disclosure in the privacy policy enough?

No. The duty is to inform the person interacting with the system at the point of interaction. A line in a policy document does not discharge it - the chatbot's opening message does.

Does Article 50 make my chatbot high-risk?

No. A chatbot with disclosure duties is a Limited Risk system. Article 50 imposes transparency, not conformity assessment: there is no notified body, no CE marking and no technical file.

What is the fine for breaching Article 50?

Article 50 breaches fall under Article 99(4): up to €15,000,000 or 3% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher - or for SMEs and start-ups, whichever is lower.