The European Union has put detail behind one of its trickier promises, that people should be able to tell when something was made by a machine. On June 10 the European AI Office published its Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, a guide that turns a line of law into a set of concrete steps.
The law in question is Article 50 of the AI Act, which requires providers and deployers of generative systems to mark and label the material those systems produce. Article 50 says what must happen. The new code explains how.
From statute to practice
The code asks AI providers to attach digitally signed metadata to their output, and to add imperceptible watermarks that survive ordinary editing. The thinking is that a label should travel with a file rather than sit in a caption anyone can delete in a second.
It also introduces a shared set of EU icons that publishers and platforms can place on AI-generated images, video and text. The icons are free to use and form part of the code itself, so a reader in Lisbon and a reader in Helsinki see the same mark and learn to recognise it.
One distinction matters for anyone weighing whether to bother. The code is voluntary. The transparency duties in Article 50 are not. Following the code is one way to show a regulator you are meeting the legal obligation, but the obligation stands on its own, and it applies from August 2, 2026.
Why now
The timing is deliberate. The bulk of the AI Act's transparency rules switch on this August, and companies operating in Europe have been asking for practical guidance rather than principles. Signed metadata, watermarking and a free detection tool give them something concrete to build against, which is more than the statute alone offered.
Europe has spent the past year working on frontier AI from several angles. Brussels recently eased and delayed parts of the AI Act to give industry more room, while across the Atlantic the US government ordered Anthropic to pull two new models over national-security concerns. The labelling code is a quieter intervention, aimed less at the models themselves and more at what they leave behind.
Whether watermarks hold up against determined removal is a fair question, and one the code does not pretend to have fully solved. What it does is give the August deadline a shape. Companies now know what good-faith compliance looks like, which puts them a step ahead of where they were a week ago.
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