EU Commission publishes AI Act transparency guidelines ahead of the August deadline

2:00 PM · July 21, 2026

The European Commission published guidelines meant to help AI providers and deployers meet the transparency obligations under the EU AI Act ahead of the rules taking effect on August 2. The guidelines clarify which companies and systems fall under the transparency requirements for what the Act calls directly interactive AI systems, including chatbots and similar conversational tools, and set out obligations to add machine readable marks that enable detection of AI generated or manipulated content such as synthetic images, audio, or video. Under the rules, deployers must also notify people when they encounter deepfakes, when they are consuming AI generated text on matters of public interest that has not been reviewed by a human, and when a system is using emotion recognition or biometric categorization on them. The Commission frames the overall goal as reducing the risk of deception and manipulation by ensuring people can reliably recognize when they are interacting with an AI system or consuming AI generated content, rather than mistaking it for something produced or reviewed by a person. The guidelines arrive as companies operating in the EU face a compressed timeline to bring their products into compliance, with the August 2 deadline now just weeks away and enforcement details, including how strictly national regulators will interpret edge cases the guidelines describe, still to be tested in practice.