Article 50(2) · due 2 December 2026
Article 50(2) requires AI-generated content to be marked in a machine-readable format — a visible caption on its own does not satisfy it. In our scan of 883 EU sites, only 0.4% carried any such marking. This writes the IPTC provenance straight into your file. It runs in your browser; the image is never uploaded.
Machine-readable marking is the part with a deadline, but it is not the whole duty. Article 50(4) separately requires deployers to disclose deepfakes and AI-generated text published on matters of public interest.
So crawlers and platforms can read the claim without downloading the asset. Paste into the page that publishes the image.
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It writes IPTC digitalSourceType into an XMP packet inside the file — an iTXt chunk for PNG, an APP1 segment for JPEG. That is the vocabulary the AI Act's machine-readable requirement is generally read against, and the same one Adobe, Google and the major agencies use.
It does not sign anything. A full C2PA Content Credential is cryptographically signed and tamper-evident. XMP is a plain assertion — anyone can strip or forge it. For journalism or evidentiary use you want C2PA proper; for a marketing image, IPTC provenance is the proportionate step.
Metadata gets stripped. Most social platforms and many CDNs discard XMP on re-encode. Keep the marking on the original and on what you serve from your own domain, and do not assume it survives a trip through someone else's pipeline.
The free scan checks whether your site discloses AI chat under Article 50(1), and reports what it can and cannot see. Takes about ten seconds.
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