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Does your site have an automated chat? Since 2 August 2026 you have to say so
Article 50 of the EU AI Act has applied since August and was not postponed. It reaches the ordinary shop that added a support widget without thinking much about it. Here is what is owed, by when, and how to check it yourself in five minutes.
| In force since | 2 August 2026 |
| Next deadline | 2 December 2026, marking |
| Core duty | say so at the first interaction |
| Ceiling | €15M or 3% of turnover |
| For SMEs | whichever is lower |
| Enforcement in Italy | ACN |
What changed in August
Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 came into force in stages. Since 2 August 2026 the transparency obligations of Article 50 apply: these are the ones that touch an ordinary website, not the complicated systems the papers write about.
This is worth spelling out because in July regulation (EU) 2026/1744, the digital omnibus, postponed a good number of deadlines. Plenty of people read “postponed” and stopped reading. The postponement concerns high-risk systems, moved to 2 December 2027 and 2 August 2028. Article 50 was not postponed.
The only extension touching Article 50 covers one point: machine-readable marking of generated content, for systems already on the market before August, has a four-month adjustment period ending on 2 December 2026.
The obligations, one line each
| Art. 50(1) | Anyone talking to an automated chat has to be told, unless it is obvious |
| Art. 50(2) | AI-generated content must be marked in a machine-readable format |
| Art. 50(3) | People exposed to emotion recognition or biometric categorisation must be informed |
| Art. 50(4) | Images, audio and video depicting real people or events must be declared artificial |
| Art. 50(5) | The information comes at the first interaction, clear, distinguishable and accessible |
| Art. 4 | Measures supporting AI literacy of the staff operating the tools |
| Art. 5 | Some practices are banned: social scoring, exploiting vulnerabilities, emotions at work |
Source: regulation (EU) 2024/1689 as amended by regulation (EU) 2026/1744. The wording is ours, the substance is that of the articles cited.
The question that matters: who answers, a person or a system?
The Article 50(1) duty bites when there is an AI system on the other side. If a colleague answers, nothing is owed. The catch is that nearly every chat product today does both: the person during office hours, the automated system at night and at weekends. In that case the duty exists, and it exists at night.
The same goes for automated message handling, for the configurator that recommends a product, and for the virtual try-on that uses the camera. That last one is the delicate case: if it works on faces, Article 9 GDPR joins Article 50, since biometric data is a special category.
How to check it yourself
- Open your own site in a private window and start the chat. Look at the first message: does it say you are writing to an automated assistant? If it says so only after three exchanges, or never, that is where something is missing.
- Look at night. Many widgets switch to automatic outside working hours. A check run at eleven in the morning says nothing about eleven at night.
- Ask the widget vendor whether the product uses an AI system to compose answers, and whether it offers a setting for the opening notice. Almost all of them have it and almost nobody turns it on, because it ships off.
- Check the privacy page. Writing it there helps but is not enough: Article 50(5) requires the information "at the latest at the time of the first interaction". A page nobody opens is not the first interaction.
- Look at your published images and copy. If product descriptions or photos are generated, the marking duty under Article 50(2) sits with whoever supplies the system, but the choice to use it is yours, and the 2 December 2026 deadline covers the tools you are already running.
The dates
| 2 February 2025 | Banned practices (Art. 5) and AI literacy (Art. 4) |
| 2 August 2026 | Article 50 transparency obligations. Not postponed |
| 2 December 2026 | End of the adjustment period for marking generative systems already on the market |
| 2 December 2027 | Annex III high-risk systems, postponed by the digital omnibus |
| 2 August 2028 | High-risk systems embedded in products, Annex I |
What is at stake, and who enforces it
For Article 50 the ceiling in Article 99(4) is €15 million or 3% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. For small and medium enterprises and start-ups, paragraph 6 reverses the rule: whichever is lower. For an ordinary company that difference changes everything.
In Italy, law 132 of 23 September 2025 gives market surveillance and sanctioning powers to the National Cybersecurity Agency and notification duties to AgID. The implementing decrees, which modulate the amounts within the limits of the regulation, were finally approved by the Council of Ministers on 4 August 2026.
One thing worth knowing: Article 99(7) lists the factors an authority weighs when setting the amount, and three of them depend on what you did before the inspection. The technical and organisational measures in place, cooperation with the authority, and whether you reported the problem yourself. That is not rhetoric: it is why writing down what you use and how you declare it is worth more than the fix itself.
The point almost nobody notices
Article 50(5) closes by requiring that the information meet the applicable accessibility requirements. Which means the notice saying "you are talking to an automated assistant" has to be readable by a screen reader, reachable by keyboard and sufficiently contrasted, like the rest of the site. The two regimes meet exactly there, and a badly built notice banner misses both at once.
Prefer us to look at it
The check detects which AI components your site actually loads, by recording the resources the pages request, and looks for the notice in the linked legal pages. Then we write to you with what it found and which questions remain open, because some answers sit in your contracts rather than on your site.
This guide is not legal advice. Dates, articles and amounts are those of regulation (EU) 2024/1689, regulation (EU) 2026/1744 and Italian law 132/2025, as of September 2026.