Some dates pass quietly. This one didn't. Since Sunday the AI Act has been enforced for real, and the transparency rules we talked about in July are now an obligation with an institution behind it.
Fact
The facts: in a press release from 31 July, the European Commission announced that from 2 August its AI Office, together with national authorities, starts enforcing the AI Act. From the same date, the transparency obligations apply: a chatbot and any other interactive AI system must tell the user that the other side is a machine; images, video and audio generated or altered with AI (deepfakes) must carry a label; generated content must also carry a machine-readable mark so it can be recognized automatically. The Commission published a first list of over 180 organizations that signed the code of practice on transparency, and opened three channels: an AI Act complaints tool, a whistleblower reporting tool, and a channel for complaints from providers building on general-purpose models. Source: European Commission, 31.07.2026.
What's new here isn't the rules - we knew those from July. What's new is the plumbing of enforcement. A complaint is filed with a form. A tip can also come from an employee inside. A complaint can also be filed by a company that builds on someone else's model and feels squeezed by the terms. And the list of code signatories is the other half of the mechanism - a public way to show you're one of the compliant ones, before anyone asks.
Regulation without a complaints channel is a wish. This one has three.
Here at home, enforcement now has an address. Until now, non-compliance was a matter of conscience. Since Sunday it's a matter of who points you out. And the most motivated auditor doesn't sit in Brussels - it's your competitor, one form away.
If AI talks to your customers or makes content for them, check off three things this week: a sentence in the chat, a label on the image, a machine mark in the file. Get it done before someone asks. Asking now has a form.
The visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.