2026-07-30 - The deadline that didn't move

The Omnibus deferred high-risk obligations by 17 to 24 months and left Article 50 untouched; the four-month marking transition is a grandfather clause for incumbents, so a new agent shipped in August carries the full obligation from day one.

Post

Everyone heard that the EU delayed the AI Act. Almost nobody checked which parts.

On Sunday, 2 August, Article 50 lands. It was never deferred — and it does not care whether your system is high-risk.

The Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, entered into force on 27 July. It pushed stand-alone high-risk obligations to December 2027 and product-embedded ones to August 2028. Article 50 transparency it left exactly where it was.

Four duties. Three of them touch any agent you have in production:

  1. If your agent talks to a human, tell them it is a machine — at the latest at the first interaction. Not in the FAQ. Not in the terms.
  2. If it generates audio, image, video OR TEXT, the output must be marked in a machine-readable format. Text is in scope. Most teams read "synthetic media" and mentally skip the line.
  3. If that output goes out as a deepfake, or as text published to inform the public on a matter of public interest, that is a separate disclosure — and it sits with the deployer, not with your model vendor.

Here is the part I nearly got wrong. There IS a transition on the marking duty: recital 38 grants four months, to 2 December. But read who it is for — "providers who have already placed their systems on the market before the 2 August 2026". That is a grandfather clause, not a grace period. Ship a new agent on 3 August and you mark from day one. The transition rewards the incumbent and penalises the launch.

What I would do Monday:

  1. Map every egress your agent has. Surfaces that reach a human need disclosure; surfaces that reach another system need marking. They are different obligations and they fail differently.
  2. Put the marking in the emit path, not the UI layer. A badge in your frontend is not machine-readable.
  3. Read the Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content — final version 10 June, voluntary. Signing buys you one uniform compliance story instead of arguing equivalence with 27 national authorities.

€15M or 3% of worldwide turnover is the ceiling. The real cost is retrofitting provenance into a system that never had it.

Which of your agents can currently say "I am not a human" — in a form a machine can read?

#EUAIAct #AgenticAI #AICompliance #AIEngineering #Berlin

First comment

Sources, so you can check the dates against the instruments rather than the commentary:

The Omnibus itself — Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 of 8 July 2026. Recital 38 is the four-month marking transition; recital 40 has the new high-risk dates: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ:L_202601744

Article 50 in full, including the "as far as technically feasible" qualifier on marking: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/

Article 99(4)(g) — the €15,000,000 / 3% ceiling that applies to transparency breaches: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/99/

Publication in the Official Journal on 24 July and entry into force on 27 July: https://www.hunton.com/privacy-and-cybersecurity-law-blog/eu-digital-omnibus-on-ai-enters-into-force

The Commission's own page on the Code of Practice — final version 10 June 2026, covering Article 50(2), (4) and (5), currently under adequacy assessment: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-ai-generated-content

A readable walk-through of the eight Omnibus changes, including the marking transition: https://www.orrick.com/en/Insights/2026/07/EU-AI-Act-Update-Digital-Omnibus-Finalizes-8-Compliance-Changes

One point I cut for length: the Code ships an optional EU labelling icon in three variants. If you are going to label deepfakes or public-interest text anyway, use theirs — a bespoke badge is a thing you have to defend, and a published one is a thing you can point at.

Claims

Sources

Corrections

  • 2026-07-30 - the draft described the four-month marking window as a grace period for everyone. Recital 38 of Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 limits it to providers who placed systems on the market before 2 August 2026. Corrected before publication; the corrected reading became the spine of the edition.
  • 2026-07-30 - detailed label placement rules (icon at the top of text, repeated for video, audible disclaimer for audio) were cut. Sourced to one law-firm briefing and not corroborated by the Commission's own page on the Code. Held at single-source in CLAIM-2026-07-30-07.