The European Commission said on 9 July that its Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content adequately covers the AI Act’s obligations for marking and labelling. The transparency duties apply from 2 August 2026, including informing people when they interact with AI and adding machine-readable signals to certain synthetic content. [1]
Voluntary does not mean irrelevant
The code is not a new law. It is a practical instrument: providers and deployers can use it to demonstrate how they meet the legal duties. The Commission’s assessment gives companies a common reference point, while signatories still need to implement the technical and organisational measures in their own products. [1][2]
The distinction matters for newsrooms, platforms and software teams. A label in an editor interface is not enough if metadata disappears when a file is resized, re-encoded or syndicated. Compliance is therefore partly a pipeline problem: provenance, user-facing disclosure and detection need to travel together.
The public-interest edge
Legal analysis from K&L Gates notes that Article 50 also covers deployers that publish AI-generated or manipulated content on matters of public interest, including text, images and video. [2] TechTimes describes the approaching 2 August enforcement date and the separate timeline for high-risk obligations. [3] The details are technical, but the principle is simple: the closer synthetic content is to public information, the more important clear provenance becomes.
What to prepare
Organisations should inventory where their systems generate or transform content, decide which labels are visible to users, preserve machine-readable metadata and document who controls exceptions. The code can reduce ambiguity, but it cannot substitute for testing.
The practical test is a chain of evidence. A provider must identify which content is synthetic, expose the signal to machines, inform the person on the other side and keep records that a regulator can inspect. Treating the code as an implementation checklist makes the August deadline concrete without pretending that a voluntary code replaces the legal duty. [1][2][3]
