Transparency obligations under the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act took effect on August 2, requiring providers and deployers of certain AI systems to disclose when content is AI-generated or when users are interacting with a machine.

The rules fall under Article 50 of the AI Act and apply immediately to all in-scope systems regardless of when they were placed on the market, according to European Commission guidance published around the effective date.

Under the new requirements, AI systems that interact directly with users must clearly disclose that the user is communicating with AI rather than a human. Providers of systems that generate or manipulate text, images, audio or video must ensure the resulting content is identifiable as artificially generated, using machine-readable markers.

The obligations extend to general-purpose AI systems capable of producing synthetic audio, image, video or text. Deployers of deepfakes and certain AI-generated content touching matters of public interest face additional disclosure duties under the same article.

There is some breathing room built in. The AI Omnibus provisional agreement, reached in May, gives generative AI systems that were already on the market before August 2 until December 2 to meet the machine-readable marking requirement specifically.

Noncompliance carries real financial risk. Companies that fail to meet the transparency obligations face fines of up to 15 million euros or 3 percent of worldwide annual turnover, whichever figure is higher, giving the rules teeth beyond reputational pressure.

The transparency rules are separate from, and less severe than, the AI Act’s restrictions on systems deemed to carry unacceptable risk, but they represent one of the first broadly applicable compliance deadlines companies operating in the EU market have had to meet since the law began phasing in. Legal and compliance teams at firms deploying chatbots, content generation tools and synthetic media platforms have spent recent months auditing their products against the new disclosure standard.