On August 2, 2026, the European Commission’s AI Office switched on the enforcement machinery of Regulation 2024/1689, gaining formal supervisory powers over general-purpose AI providers and activating the Article 50 transparency regime that Brussels has been drafting, consulting, and pre-announcing since 2024. The rulebook stopped being a compliance exercise and became a jurisdictional fact.

The scope is broad and deliberately so. Chatbots and voice assistants must tell users they’re speaking to a machine unless it’s obvious. Deepfakes, including face swaps and substantial facial modifications in commercial content, must be labelled by whoever deploys them. Generative systems have to embed machine-readable marks, watermarks or metadata, so outputs remain detectable downstream. AI-generated text on matters of public interest, administration, justice, health, consumer safety, has to be marked too.

Fines are structured to bite. Companies face up to €15 million or 3% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher, with proportionality carve-outs for SMEs. EU institutions cap out at €750,000. Cooley reads Regulation 2024/1689 to apply to providers and deployers inside and outside the EU whenever outputs reach the European market, the familiar extraterritorial reflex of Brussels regulation since GDPR in 2018.

Exemptions exist, and Euronews notes they matter: personal non-professional use, scientific research, open-source systems, law enforcement, and minor grammar or spellcheck edits.

Timing is staggered. Most Article 50 obligations apply immediately. Systems already on the market before August 2 have until December 2, 2026 to meet the machine-readable marking requirement, the same date rules on non-consensual sexual content and CSAM take effect.

The AI Office can now request information from GPAI providers, obtain models for evaluation, and order corrective measures. Signatories to the voluntary Code of Practice on Transparency get a presumption of conformity. Holdouts get scrutiny. The choice architecture is the point.

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