EU closes Article 50 transparency-guidelines consultation June 3 ahead of August 2026 AI Act labeling rules

The European Commission's targeted consultation on its draft guidelines for transparency obligations under Article 50 of the EU AI Act closed on June 3, 2026, having opened May 8. The draft guidelines — accompanied by a separate, concurrently finalizing voluntary Code of Practice on AI-generated content — clarify what providers and deployers of interactive and generative AI must do before the Article 50 rules become applicable on August 2, 2026. Covered obligations include: informing users when they are interacting with an AI system (e.g., chatbots); embedding machine-readable marks in generative-AI outputs so synthetic content can be detected; disclosing deepfakes and AI-generated text published on matters of public interest; and notice requirements for emotion-recognition and biometric-categorization systems.

The consultation invited feedback via online questionnaire from a broad audience — startups, SMEs, large companies, public authorities, academia, researchers and citizens. The exercise is part of the AI Office's run-up to enforcement: ahead of the August 2026 entry-into-application, the Office is preparing compliance assessments and engaging directly with AI providers. The transparency Code of Practice on AI-generated content had a first draft on December 17, 2025 and a second on March 5, 2026, with a final version expected in late June 2026.

The closing of the consultation is a concrete, in-window procedural milestone in operationalizing the AI Act's generative-content and deepfake-labeling regime — the rules that will directly bind frontier GPAI providers' deployment in the EU market.