Article 50: the guidelines land 12 days before the deadline — what they settle

The timeline, first

The transparency obligations of Article 50 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 apply on 2 August 2026. On 20 July 2026 the Commission approved the content of its guidelines on those obligations — decision C(2026) 5054 — with formal adoption still pending the finalisation of the language versions in the 24 official languages. The substance is therefore fixed; only translation still gates publication of the text. These guidelines are non-binding: they set out the Commission's reading, they add no obligation and remove none, and interpreting the law ultimately falls to the Court of Justice of the European Union. They illuminate the implementation; they do not settle the cases.

What was NOT delayed

Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 (opens in new tab), in force since 27 July 2026, confirms that Article 50 does apply on 2 August. The Article 111(4) transitional it inserts covers one thing only: the Article 50(2) marking, only for providers, only for systems placed on the market before 2 August 2026 — for those, and for that marking alone, the deadline moves to 2 December 2026. Plainly: a provider whose generator was already on the market on 1 August gets four extra months to make its outputs machine-readably marked — and nothing else. The rest of Article 50 — informing the user (50(1)), flagging deepfakes and public-interest text (50(4)) — applies with no delay, including to those systems already on the market. The deferral is narrow; it is neither a moratorium nor a blank cheque.

The detail nobody flags: the 50(4) asymmetry

Article 50(4) handles two cases with two different reference dates. For deepfakes (image, audio, video), the date that counts is that of GENERATION: content produced before the deadline need not be labelled retroactively, even if it keeps circulating afterwards. For public-interest text, the date of PUBLICATION is what counts: text written before August but published after 2 August 2026 must be disclosed — unless the editorial-control exemption applies, i.e. where the content underwent editorial control and a person holds editorial responsibility for its publication. The consequence is counter-intuitive: the same model can produce, on the same day, an image that is exempt from marking and an article that must be flagged. Two regimes, two clocks; conflating them is the first inventory mistake.

The code of practice's promotion

The final guidelines assess the Code of Practice on Transparency as an adequate means of demonstrating that these obligations are met. That is a promotion: from an optional tool, the code becomes the route the Commission recognises as sufficient. In practice, signing up becomes a usable signal rather than a goodwill exercise — a named framework to align on, one you can cite, and one that structures the burden of proof on the day you have to produce it.

Penalties, one line

Article 99(4)(g): up to €15M or 3% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. Article 99(6): for SMEs and start-ups, whichever of the two is LOWER applies instead.

What it changes, in practice

Three reflexes hold up. Inform the user before the first message of a conversational system, not in buried notices: disclosure must precede the interaction, not document it after the fact. Then make sure the machine marking survives the whole asset pipeline — export, recompression, the CDN hop, a third party's screenshot — where metadata is most often lost; marking that does not clear the pipeline is worth nothing. Finally, keep an inventory of the systems that generate synthetic content and of their outputs, dated against the right clock (generation for images, publication for text). None of this says whether a given system or organisation falls within the scope of Article 50: that characterisation is for the law, not a watch note.