The European Union has published its AI content labelling playbook, a voluntary Code of Practice meant to help companies meet transparency rules that become law across the bloc on August 2 onwards. The European Commission released the final Code on 10 June, setting out practical steps for the businesses that build and use generative AI to mark and label what their systems produce.
The Code itself is optional. The obligations it points to are not. They sit under Article 50 of the EU AI Act, and from August 2, 2026, they apply whether or not a company signs the Commission’s guidance. Signing simply gives a business a recognised way to show it complies.
What the AI content labelling rules actually require
From August, two things must be clearly flagged. Deepfakes and AI-generated or AI-manipulated text published on matters of public interest have to carry a label. Anyone chatting with an interactive AI system, such as a customer-service bot, also has to be told they are dealing with a machine.
The Commission frames it as a way to help users spot AI-made or AI-altered material and narrow the space for deception. “Europeans have a right to know whether what they see, hear or read has been made or altered by AI, especially when such content can shape public debate,” said Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.
She cast the Code as a practical route to labelling that AI providers and deployers can follow before the rules bite in August. The Code splits the work between the two sides of the AI supply chain. The companies that build generative models are asked to mark their output in a machine-readable format, so it can be detected further down the line.
The companies that deploy those models, the ones putting AI to work in real products, handle the visible labelling, which, for public-interest AI text, applies when the content has gone out without human review or editorial control. To keep it workable, the Code leans on open technical standards and a common EU icon, meant to give users a consistent visual cue and spare businesses from inventing their own.
None of this is the final word. The Code is now open for signatures, and the Commission is urging all providers and deployers to sign. It still needs the Commission and the AI Board to judge it adequately, and separate Commission guidelines are due to clarify the law and cover what the Code leaves out. Drawn up by six independent experts with input from more than 180 stakeholders, it is the first instrument to tackle AI content labelling under the Act.
The timing leaves little slack. Companies serving European users have under two months to work out what they need to label and how, and to decide whether to sign. Plenty of the harder detail still rests on guidelines the Commission has yet to publish.
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