Writing
Article 50 is already in force. December is a different deadline.
If your Article 50 programme is scheduled against 2 December 2026, it is scheduled against the wrong date, and has been for six weeks.
What actually happened
The EU AI Act's transparency obligations under Article 50 became applicable on 2 August 2026. The European Commission adopted guidelines on them on 20 July, ahead of application. Since 2 August, providers and deployers of the relevant systems have been inside a live obligation, with breaches falling under Article 99(4): up to €15 million or 3% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. Article 99(6) caps SMEs and start-ups at the lower of the two rather than the higher.
Separately, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 — the Digital Omnibus on AI, in force since 27 July 2026 — created a four-month transition. That transition is narrow in three specific ways:
- It applies to the Article 50(2) machine-readable marking obligation only. The other three transparency obligations in Article 50 were not deferred at all.
- It applies only to systems already placed on the market before 2 August 2026. Anything placed on the market on or after that date had to comply immediately.
- It ends on 2 December 2026.
So “2 December” is true, for one obligation, for legacy systems. It is not the date Article 50 starts. Those two statements have been collapsing into each other in briefings, vendor decks and conference panels since August, and the collapsed version is the one that circulates.
Why the error is expensive rather than merely wrong
A misdated obligation does not distribute its harm evenly. It concentrates it on exactly the organisations least able to absorb it.
Consider who is in which bucket. A company that shipped a generative feature in September 2026 is in scope from the day it shipped, with no transition available to it — and is also the company most likely to have taken its compliance timeline from a summary written for the incumbents. The transition protects the systems that already existed. The newest entrants, who had the least time to build marking into the pipeline, got nothing, and are the most likely to believe they did.
The second cost is sequencing. If you believe the obligation begins in December, the rational plan is to start marking work in the autumn. If it began in August, the rational plan was to establish, in August, a record of what you were doing about it. Those produce different artefacts. The first produces a feature. The second produces a dated, contemporaneous account of a control — which, as it happens, is the thing that is worth something if anyone ever asks.
The part that gets missed entirely
While the discussion has been about Article 50's dates, the Digital Omnibus also inserted points (ba) and (bb) into Article 5(1) — the prohibited practices list. Those cover AI systems generating or manipulating non-consensual intimate imagery and child sexual abuse material, they apply from 2 December 2026, and they sit in the €35 million or 7% band rather than the €15m/3% one.
Two features of that drafting matter more than the headline number. The prohibition reaches providers for whom such output is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the system, not only those who built it for the purpose — so a general-purpose model is not outside it by virtue of its stated use. And there is a safe harbour where effective technical safeguards reliably prevent those outputs.
That safe harbour is the whole game, and it is a technical and evidentiary question rather than a drafting one. It asks what you built and whether you can show it. An organisation spending the autumn debating a marking deadline is not spending the autumn on that.
What to do about it this week
Establish which bucket each system is in
Placed on the market before 2 August 2026, or after? That single fact decides whether you have had an obligation for six weeks or have until December, and it is per-system, not per-company.
Separate the four Article 50 obligations
Only 50(2) marking got the transition. If your programme treats Article 50 as one dated block, it is deferring three obligations that were never deferred.
Date your controls now, not retroactively
Whatever you already do — filters, refusals, review, disclosure — the evidence of when it went live is worth more than the control's description. A record written after an incident is worth close to nothing, and looks like what it is.
Sourcing, and a caveat
Every date and figure above was checked against the Commission's own material and the Official Journal on 11 September 2026, not taken from a summary. Links are on Why now.
We also want to be clear about one thing we are not saying. Claims about AI Act enforcement actions and fine totals circulate regularly. We have not been able to verify any of them against the Commission's own records, so we do not repeat them. This piece argues the dates are misunderstood, not that anyone has been penalised.
This describes law. It is not legal advice, and we are not your lawyers.