Article 50 countdown: what the last weeks before 2 August 2026 look like

2026-07-25 · RapidAct team

The pattern from GDPR is repeating. In the weeks before 25 May 2018, half the internet discovered cookie banners. In these weeks before 2 August 2026, the same discovery is happening with AI disclosure — except this time the warning signs are louder.

What we're seeing in the field

We manually audited small and mid-size EU-facing sites this month — the segment below the enterprise compliance radar:

• A supplement e-commerce running an automated Zendesk triage flow with zero AI disclosure — and its widget UI accidentally serving Chinese text to Spanish visitors.
• An insurtech whose AI voice agents handle a large share of inbound calls, while customers leave reviews thanking the "agent" by name.
• A Barcelona chatbot vendor whose own homepage AI agent opens with "Hey! What brings you here today?" and never mentions it's an AI.

These aren't bad actors. They're normal businesses that either don't know, or misread the Digital Omnibus as "the AI Act was delayed". It wasn't — only the high-risk rules moved.

The one-afternoon plan

1. Hour 1: scan your site. Know what AI is publicly visible on it.
2. Hour 2: establish provider and deployer roles, then install the free badge where a direct-interaction notice fits.
3. Hour 3: separate deepfakes and public-interest text from the provider's machine-readable marking duty.
4. Hour 4: record live URLs, wording and dated desktop/mobile proof, then put a quarterly recheck in the calendar.

That's it. That's the whole thing for most websites. The companies scrambling in September will be the ones who assumed compliance meant consultants.

Why doing it now beats doing it later

Enforcement will need visible early examples, and regulators (plus competitors, plus journalists) can scan the public web exactly as easily as we can. Being a small, quiet, correctly-labeled site is a much better strategy than being a famous, unlabeled one.

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