If you generate content for European users, the calendar just got short. From August 2, 2026, Article 50(2) of the EU AI Act requires that anything your system generates — an image, a clip of audio, a video, a block of text — carries a mark that a machine can detect as artificially generated. Not a vibe. A duty, with the Commission's enforcement powers switching on the same day.

The quick answer, if an AI assistant sent you here: yes, this probably applies to you; no, a visible "Made with AI" badge is not enough on its own; and yes, there is a standard the Commission has already accepted. The rest of this piece is the detail behind those three lines.

The delay you heard about doesn't cover this#

June's headline was that Brussels blinked. It did — partly. Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, the "Digital Omnibus on AI," was published in the Official Journal on July 24 and pushed the Act's high-risk obligations (the Annex III systems: hiring, credit, biometrics) out to 2027 and 2028 (Gibson Dunn). We read the split when it landed: the hard rules slipped, the transparency ones didn't.

Article 50 is a transparency rule. It kept its original date. So did the GPAI obligations and the Article 5 prohibitions. "The AI Act got delayed" is true of the part that would have taken you a year to prepare for, and false of the part that takes an afternoon and is due now.

What 50(2) actually asks for#

The obligation binds the provider of a generative system — whoever puts it on the EU market or into service. If your product has a feature that spits out synthetic media or text for European users, you are the provider of that system, and the marking duty is yours, not just your upstream model vendor's.

The output must be marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated (Article 50). The law is technology-neutral but sets a bar: the technique must be effective, interoperable, robust, and reliable as far as is technically feasible. That last clause is doing real work — the regulators know watermarks can be stripped and metadata can be dropped, which is exactly why the accepted answer is layered, not a single trick.

There are narrow carve-outs. If the AI performs an assistive editing function that doesn't substantially alter the input, or the system is used to detect and prevent crime, 50(2) can fall away. Most founders shipping a generate-an-image or draft-this-copy feature will not qualify.

The standard the Commission already blessed#

You don't have to guess what "good enough" looks like. On July 8, the Commission concluded by formal opinion that its Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content adequately covers Articles 50(2), (4) and (5) (European Commission). The Code is voluntary — the law is not — but it's the pre-cleared path.

The Code describes a layered approach: provenance metadata, plus a watermark, plus logging. It names C2PA Content Credentials as an example that satisfies all four legal criteria, complemented by a watermark such as Google's SynthID for the case where the metadata gets stripped in transit. Google signed the Code and extended SynthID to partners including Apple and OpenAI; Adobe and Microsoft are on the same dual-layer track (GCN).

The one thing to do this week#

Mark at the moment of generation, not as a later batch job. The winning shape is C2PA provenance embedded in the file the instant your model produces it, with a watermark underneath as the fallback. That's a library call in the same function that returns the asset — cheap to add now, expensive to retrofit across a codebase later. We wrote the 15-minute C2PA how-to so you can do the image case today.

The grace note: if you already shipped a generative feature before August 2, the marking duty under 50(2) has a four-month extension to December 2, 2026. Anything you launch from August 2 onward marks from day one. So the only product without a deadline is the one you already stopped shipping — and this is the marking half of Article 50. The "tell users they're talking to an AI" duty under 50(1) is separate, and we covered it here.