On June 10 the European Commission published the final Code of Practice on marking and labelling AI-generated content. The voluntary code is the operational guidance for Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which requires providers to mark generative outputs in machine-readable form and deployers to clearly label deepfakes and AI-generated text on matters of public interest.
The Commission opened the code for signatures the same day. Companies that sign on get a structured path to compliance — and presumably some regulatory goodwill — ahead of August 2, when Article 50 obligations begin to apply. The code splits requirements between providers (model developers, who must embed detectable watermarks or metadata) and deployers (downstream operators, who must surface labels to users).
This sits inside a fraught EU regulatory moment. The Commission proposed deferring the high-risk-system deadline from August 2026 to December 2027, but the April 28 trilogue ended without agreement. If no deal is struck before August, the high-risk obligations and the Article 50 labeling rules both go live on the same day. Q1 EU enforcement already produced 50 fines totalling €250 million, mostly for general-purpose AI noncompliance.
For learners: the watermarking requirement is technically interesting because it pushes the burden of provenance back to model developers, not just platforms. Anyone shipping generative AI products into Europe should already be testing whether their model provider's watermark survives common round-trips — screenshots, re-encoding, paraphrasing — because that's the question regulators and users will actually ask.