Article 50(1) binding since 2 Aug 2026 / day of enforcement

EU AI Act · Article 50 · Transparency duties

The EU now requires you to label your AI.

Two duties, two dates. Telling people when they are talking to an AI has applied since 2 August 2026. Marking AI-generated images, audio and video in a machine-readable format is due 2 December 2026. In our scan of 883 EU sites, almost nobody does either.

Scan your page for free What the rules say

No account, no upload. The scan runs in your browser.

Pages fetch through public read-only relays. See the privacy policy.

Compliance clock

of Article 50(1) enforcement. The disclosure duty binds since 2 Aug 2026

days until the 2 Dec 2026 machine-readable marking deadline

Step one · Free scanner

Check a page in about four seconds.

Paste any public URL. ClearLabel reads the page's public HTML in your browser, fingerprints 36 known chat and voice-AI vendors, and looks for AI-disclosure wording in 12 EU languages.

In our scan of 883 EU sites, 37% of chat widgets sat on a contact or help page rather than the homepage. So scan those too.

What it cannot see

Only the public HTML the page serves. It cannot open your chat widget, see inside your vendor console, or tell whether your AI mode is switched on, and it will miss widgets injected later by a tag manager. A fast first pass, not an audit.

Scan output idle

Vendor fingerprint (36 known) —

Disclosure wording · 12 languages —

IPTC / C2PA media marking —

Results stay on this device. The URL you type and the result it produces are never sent to us.

97%

of EU online shops running a chat widget show no AI disclosure (180-shop frame)

0.4%

of the 883-site corpus carry machine-readable AI content marking

703

Tranco-ranked EU sites in the main frame, 883 scanned in total (full study)

chat and voice-AI vendors fingerprinted (by vendor)

Two duties. Know which one you are failing.

ART. 50(1) In force

Disclose AI conversations

If a visitor can be answered by an AI agent, they have to be told. Clearly, and no later than the first interaction. The duty is the deployer's, not the vendor's: switching on the AI mode in Zendesk, Intercom, Gorgias, Tidio or HubSpot makes it yours.

Ready-made disclosure

You're chatting with an AI assistant. It can make mistakes. Ask for a human at any time.

Where it goes

Set it as the assistant's opening message, inside the chat window itself. Per-vendor placement →

ART. 50(2) Due 2 Dec 2026

Mark AI-generated media

Machine-readable marking, not just a caption: synthetic image, audio, video and text must carry an interoperable signal such as IPTC or C2PA. Only 0.4% of the sites we scanned had any.

The marking itself

Iptc4xmpExt:DigitalSourceType = trainedAlgorithmicMedia

Labelling tool

Our free tool writes IPTC provenance into your PNGs and JPEGs without uploading them. Label an image →

What actually changed, and when

The Digital Omnibus deferred a great deal of the AI Act. It did not defer the Article 50 transparency duties. This is the part most compliance content still gets wrong.

2 Aug 2026

Now

Article 50(1) applies: providers must design AI systems that interact with people so those people are informed they are dealing with an AI, unless it is obvious to a reasonably well-informed person. Article 50(4) adds the deployer duty to disclose deepfakes and AI-generated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest.
2 Dec 2026

days

Article 50(2) machine-readable marking of synthetic audio, image, video and text. Systems already on the market before 2 August 2026 got a four-month transition under the Digital Omnibus, ending on this date.
2 Dec 2027

Deferred

The Digital Omnibus, given final Council approval on 29 June 2026, pushed most standalone high-risk (Annex III) obligations back by 16 months. Article 50 transparency was not among them.

Who it binds

Deployers, not just AI vendors

If you switched on an AI agent in Zendesk, Intercom, Gorgias, Tidio or HubSpot, you are a deployer. The duty is yours, not your vendor's.

Where it reaches

Anyone selling into the EU

The Act follows the user. A US or UK company with EU customers is in scope for the people it serves in the EU.

What it costs

Set by each member state

Penalties are national, not EU-wide. Article 99(4) caps transparency breaches at €15m or 3% of worldwide turnover, whichever is higher.

Step two · After the scan

Fix it in an afternoon, not a quarter.

A scan tells you where you stand. The gap after that is paperwork: the disclosure wording, where to paste it in your specific vendor's console, a published transparency notice, and a dated record proving when you decided all this. Under Article 4, the documentation is the evidence.

The Compliance Pack is generated from your scan result, so it arrives pre-filled with the vendors actually found on your site instead of blank templates you have to research yourself. It runs on the same detection engine as our published 883-site EU study.

ClearLabel gives you structured information and document drafts. It is not a law firm and this is not legal advice. For a binding view on your specific exposure, have the output reviewed by a qualified adviser in your member state.

Article 50

Compliance Pack

€49

One-off

Disclosure wording in EN/DE/FR/ES/IT/NL/PT/PL/SV/DA/FI/LT, written for the exact vendors found on your site
Step-by-step: where to paste it in your console (Zendesk, Intercom, Gorgias, Crisp, Tidio, HubSpot and 30 more)
Ready-to-publish AI Transparency Notice page (HTML + Markdown)
AI system register, pre-filled with your detected vendors
Synthetic-content labelling policy covering the 2 Dec 2026 marking duty
Dated compliance evidence record for Article 4 documentation
Re-scan and updated pack free for 12 months

Also from ClearLabel · Directive (EU) 2023/970

Hiring in the EU? Your job ads have rules too.

Under the EU Pay Transparency Directive applicants get the pay range before the interview, pay-history questions are banned, and job titles must be gender-neutral. Check yours free, then get the €49 Pay Transparency Kit for ready-to-use fixes.

Check a job ad free Get the Kit: €49

Questions people actually ask

If a human answers, Article 50(1) does not bite. It bites the moment an AI system is what the visitor is actually talking to. That includes the AI agents that Zendesk, Intercom, Gorgias, Tidio and HubSpot now enable by default on many plans. That is why the scanner reports those vendors as "check required" rather than guessing: only you can confirm whether the AI mode is switched on.
Partly. The Digital Omnibus, approved by the Council on 29 June 2026, deferred most standalone high-risk obligations to 2 December 2027 and product-embedded ones by 12 months. The Article 50 transparency duties were not deferred and applied from 2 August 2026. The one Article 50 element that moved is the machine-readable marking in 50(2), which gets a transition to 2 December 2026 for systems already on the market.
It is narrow. The test is what is obvious to a reasonably well-informed, observant and circumspect person, judged in context. A widget labelled with a human first name and a photo is the opposite of obvious. If you are relying on this exemption, write down why. That reasoning is what an authority will ask to see.
Only the public HTML of the URL you enter. It fingerprints known vendor scripts and searches visible page copy for disclosure wording in twelve EU languages. It cannot open your chat widget, cannot see inside your vendor console, and cannot tell whether your AI mode is on. It will miss widgets injected later by a tag manager. Treat it as a fast first pass, not an audit.
The URL you type and the result it produces stay in your browser. They are never sent to us, and there is no account. We do count page views with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookieless, does not fingerprint you and does not track you across sites; we would rather disclose that than claim a purity we do not have. The page fetch itself is routed through a public read-only text proxy because browsers block direct cross-site reads.

Start with the scan. It takes four seconds.

Day of Article 50(1) · days until the marking duty

Scan a page Label an image