Brussels says AI Act enforcement finally gets teeth in two days

6:00 AM CET · July 31, 2026

The European Commission said Friday that from August 2, its AI Office, working alongside national authorities in each member state, will begin actively enforcing the AI Act rather than simply monitoring compliance, with new complaint and whistleblower tools already in place for reporting suspected violations. The same date brings a new set of transparency obligations into force: interactive AI systems such as chatbots must tell users plainly that they are dealing with AI rather than a human, deepfakes, meaning images, video, or audio edited or generated with AI, must be labeled as such, and AI generated or altered content more broadly must carry machine readable marks so platforms and users can detect it. The Commission said the rules are meant to “reduce deception and manipulation and help people make informed choices” while giving businesses clearer, more practical compliance obligations. More than 180 organizations have already signed the Commission’s Code of Practice on transparency of AI generated content ahead of the deadline. The announcement follows the AI Act’s Digital Omnibus amendments, which entered into force on July 27 and pushed back the toughest high risk rules, covering sectors like biometrics, education, employment, and migration, to December 2027, meaning this week’s news is about enforcement power and disclosure rules taking effect now, even as the heaviest substantive obligations remain more than a year away.