EU AI Act Article 50, in plain English

In short: Article 50 is the transparency article of the EU AI Act. The core in one sentence: if people are dealing with AI, they should be able to know it. From 2 August 2026 that holds for chatbots, for AI-generated content and for deepfakes, no matter how large your company is.

What is Article 50 of the AI Act?

The EU AI Act sorts AI systems by risk. The heaviest rules apply to high-risk uses. Article 50 sits in a different category: transparency. It is not about whether you are allowed to use AI, but about whether you are open about the fact that you use it.

The article draws a line between providers (who build or supply the AI system, such as your chat vendor) and deployers (companies that put someone else's AI to use, the term the law uses for business users). A webshop with an AI chatbot from an outside party is a deployer, and transparency duties apply to deployers too the moment their AI talks to the public or makes content for the public.

What does the AI Act require in terms of transparency?

Article 50 comes down to a handful of situations. For websites and webshops, these are the four that count:

• Chatbots and AI assistants. If a visitor is talking to an AI, they have to know it no later than the first interaction. A clear notice in or above the chat window is enough; buried in the terms it is not. The deeper question here is whether your chatbot has to announce, in so many words, that it is AI.
• AI-generated content. Text, images, audio and video created or edited by AI have to be marked as AI output in a machine-readable way, for example with metadata that a checking tool can read.
• Deepfakes. Images, audio or video that look real but were created or manipulated by AI have to be visibly labelled as such.
• AI text on matters of public interest. If you publish AI-written text that informs the public about matters of public interest, as a rule it should carry a label.

The common thread: a visitor must not be left believing that something came from a human when it came from a machine.

When does Article 50 start to apply?

The dates are fixed:

• Since 2 February 2025: AI literacy. Article 4 asks that anyone working with AI understands enough about it. No exam, but demonstrable basic knowledge, in proportion to how you deploy AI.
• From 2 August 2026: the transparency duties. The chatbot notice, the content marking and the deepfake labels become binding law from that date.
• Grace period until 2 December 2026: for generative systems that were already on the market before 2 August 2026, an extra transition period applies to the marking requirement.

Who does it apply to, and what are the fines?

An important difference from the European Accessibility Act: Article 50 has no exception for small companies. Where the EAA exempts micro-enterprises for services, the AI transparency duty applies regardless of company size. A one-person business with an AI chatbot falls under it just as much as a corporate group.

Breaches carry fines of up to 15 million euros or 3% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher, enforced by each national supervisory authority.

What does this mean for your website?

Three steps take you a long way: write down which AI you show (chat widget, AI text, AI imagery), check that the notice on your chatbot is switched on, and mark the AI content you put in front of the public. That overview becomes your evidence later.

That is exactly what the AI transparency check from Seviranta gets ready for you. We detect which chat widget is running on your site; whether it is AI-driven, you confirm yourself; we supply the notice text and an AI register alongside as your evidence; and the automatic test of whether the notice is genuinely switched on is the announced next step. For 29 euros a month or 290 a year (excl. VAT), available on its own or as an add-on to your Seviranta plan.

And the accessibility of that same chatbot we already test today: a chat widget with no keyboard operation, or with no name for the screen reader, fails under the EAA. Scan your site for free and see where you stand.

Sources: Article 50, EU AI Act · AI Act implementation timeline · Transparency rules of Article 50, explained