The EU Code of Practice for marking AI-generated content

Guidelines

The Commission's Guidelines interpret the scope of each paragraph of Article 50, including what counts as "obvious" for paragraph 1, the assistive-editing and non-substantial-alteration exceptions in paragraph 2, and the treatment of content generated in real time that is not recorded and where marking is not technically feasible.

Code of Practice (final text published June 2026)

The Code sets out measures that signatories commit to as a means of implementing Article 50(2). As published, it describes a layered approach to marking: signed metadata carrying provenance information, an imperceptible watermark embedded in the content, and, where appropriate, fingerprinting or other detection techniques. It commits signatories to offer detection of their own marks free of charge to the public, and sets a date of 2 February 2027 for an interoperable detection solution across signatories. The Commission publishes the list of signatories.

The three layers

Signed metadata carries provenance assertions attached to the file, typically as a manifest; it is removed when a file is re-encoded or re-uploaded without metadata preservation. An imperceptible watermark is a machine-readable signal embedded in the pixels, samples or tokens; persistence depends on the technique and the transformation, and vendors publish their own test results. A fingerprint or other detection is a reference computed from the content, or a classifier trained to recognise generated content; it requires a registry or a model, and no data is embedded in the content.

Sources: Commission Guidelines on Article 50; Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content; Commission FAQ.