Tech 2 August 2026

The AI Act now makes chatbots and deepfakes identify themselves, starting today

From 2 August 2026 the AI Act's transparency rules apply across the European Union: chatbots must say they are AI and deepfakes must be labelled. Fines reach 15 million euros or 3% of global annual turnover.

The direct answer: as of today, 2 August 2026, a European chatbot has to tell you it is a chatbot, and a deepfake has to arrive labelled as one. The AI Act’s transparency obligations have stopped being a calendar entry and become applicable law — in Portugal as everywhere else in the European Union.

Three things changed status in practice. Anyone interacting with an AI system has to be told so, unless it is obvious. Text, images, audio and video generated by AI must be marked in a machine-readable way, within what the available technology allows. And deepfakes — content edited or created by AI that passes itself off as real — need identification visible to the public.

What does breaking the AI Act cost?

Breaches of these obligations are punishable by up to 15 million euros or, for companies, up to 3% of total worldwide annual turnover from the previous financial year, whichever is higher. That is not a symbolic fine, which is why most European legal departments spent July going through their customer-support chatbots.

Who gets longer to comply?

Systems already on the market before today. A recent European instrument, the Digital Omnibus, gives them until 2 December 2026 to come into line. So a virtual assistant launched this week has to comply now; one that has existed since 2024 gets four more months. The heavier rules for high-risk systems were pushed out to December 2027.

To handle enforcement, the European Commission has set up a dedicated team inside its AI Office, working alongside national authorities. We previously explained in detail what this phase of the AI Act changes for anyone using AI in Portugal, and before that how watermarking of artificial content was going to work. The full official timeline is on the European Commission’s digital strategy portal.

The interesting part starts now: finding out how many European websites spend the rest of the summer adding footers that say “this was made by AI”.

By Oliver Grant

Image: Trougnouf (Benoit Brummer) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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