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Milestone · August 2, 2026

Synthetic content must be marked

Across all 27 member states it became mandatory to tell a person they are talking to a machine and to mark synthetic audio, image, video and text with a machine-readable label.

Why it matters

The one obligation that survived the summer's softening of the act is the one that concerns not the developer but the person looking.

The amendments of that same summer deferred the high-risk obligations by more than a year, but left Article 50 alone. It requires two different things: transparency in interaction, so that a person knows the other party is a machine, and a technical mark in the file itself, suitable for automatic detection. The second is harder: the mark has to survive re-encoding and cropping, and no common standard existed when the obligation took effect.

Event record

Event date
August 2, 2026
Timeline date
Event date
Verification
Sources gathered automatically · September 22, 2026
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ID
evt-0358

Article 50 applies from 2 August 2026; the date is set by Article 113 of Regulation 2024/1689.

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