From 2 August a chatbot in the EU must say it is not a person — and the Commission can now fine

The European Commission announced on 31 July 2026 that from 2 August its AI Office, together with national authorities, begins enforcing the AI Act's transparency rules. The date matters more than the rules themselves: the obligations have been on the books since the regulation entered into force, but until now nobody was collecting on them. What applies from 2 August comes from Article 50 of the regulation. Chatbots, agents and avatars must make clear that the user is dealing with a machine and not a person. Deepfakes and other generated or manipulated content must be visibly labelled and additionally carry a machine-readable marker, so that detection does not depend on a human noticing. The same article covers emotion recognition, biometric categorisation and AI-generated text published on matters of public interest without human review. The Commission has issued guidelines, a code of practice and a set of harmonised icons for labelling AI content, and published a first list of more than 180 organisations that have signed the code of practice on transparency of AI-generated content. The penalties are the part that changes behaviour. Breaches can cost up to 15 million euro or 3 percent of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher; for EU institutions the ceiling is 750,000 euro, and the regulation requires proportionality for small businesses and small mid-caps. Supervision falls to national market surveillance authorities, the AI Office and the European Data Protection Supervisor. One more date is worth writing down now. Under Article 111(3) of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, providers of general-purpose AI models placed on the market before 2 August 2025 have until 2 August 2027 to bring them into compliance — a full extra year for the generation of models that was already shipping when the rules landed. Several of the models in this catalogue fall into that window.