EU AI Act Transparency Obligations: Article 13 & Article 50

Article 13: Transparency to Deployers

Providers of high-risk AI must furnish deployers with sufficient information to use the system correctly and exercise meaningful oversight.

• Provider identity and contact details
• Intended purpose, accuracy, robustness, and cybersecurity properties
• Known limitations and known foreseeable misuses
• Performance with respect to specific persons or groups
• Input data requirements and expected output interpretation
• Human oversight measures and how to exercise them
• Maintenance and lifecycle expectations

Article 50: Transparency to Users & the Public

Article 50 applies more broadly than just high-risk systems. Four core duties:

• AI interaction disclosure — natural persons must be informed they are interacting with an AI system (e.g., chatbots), unless obvious from context
• Synthetic content marking — AI-generated audio, image, video, or text must be machine-readable and detectable as artificial
• Deepfake disclosure — content depicting real persons or events must be disclosed as artificially generated, with limited exceptions for clearly artistic, satirical, or fictional works
• Public-interest text — AI-generated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest must be disclosed unless human review and editorial responsibility apply

How Articles 13 and 50 Interact

The two transparency regimes operate at different levels of the value chain:

Article 13 is a B2B obligation between providers and deployers. Article 50 is end-user-facing. A provider of a high-risk chatbot owes Article 13 documentation to its enterprise deployers AND Article 50 disclosure to the natural persons the chatbot speaks with.

Article 50 Exceptions and Implementation Checklist

Article 50 disclosure duties come with narrow exceptions, and Article 13 documentation has concrete build requirements. Work through both:

• Interaction disclosure exception — you can skip the "you are talking to an AI" notice only where it is obvious to a reasonably well-informed person from the context of use; when in doubt, disclose
• Deepfake artistic exception — for evidently artistic, creative, satirical, or fictional work, the disclosure can be limited to a form that does not hamper the display or enjoyment of the work, rather than omitted entirely
• Law-enforcement exception — detection, prevention, investigation, and prosecution of criminal offences may be exempt from certain synthetic-content and interaction duties where authorised by law
• Machine-readable marking — synthetic-content marking must be effective, interoperable, robust, and reliable as far as technically feasible; plan for a durable technique such as watermarks, metadata, or cryptographic provenance signals
• Article 13 instructions for use — package provider identity, intended purpose, accuracy and robustness metrics, known limitations, and human-oversight measures into deployer-facing documentation you can version and update
• Timing — Article 50 transparency duties apply from 2 August 2026; build the disclosure and marking mechanisms into your product now rather than retrofitting them

This checklist is an editorial summary, not legal advice; confirm the exact conditions of each exception against the regulation text and any AI Office guidance before relying on it.