What Article 50 Actually Requires — Morgan Lewis Breaks Down the Obligations

Morgan Lewis's August 12 analysis on EU AI Act Article 50 clarified which specific obligations took effect August 2 and which the Digital Omnibus deferred. Article 50(1): providers of AI systems designed for direct human interaction — including chatbots, AI agents, and voice systems — must ensure users are informed they are interacting with an AI, unless that is obvious from context. The European Commission's guidelines identify four cumulative criteria: the system must qualify as an AI system; it must be designed for genuine two-way exchange; the interaction must be direct (the AI itself communicates, not through a human intermediary); and the interaction must be with natural persons. Machine-to-machine communication and background AI operations fall outside scope. Article 50(4) applies to deployers acting in a professional capacity who use AI to generate or manipulate text intended to inform the public on matters of general interest — a category that explicitly includes law firm client alerts and thought-leadership content distributed at scale. For law firms publishing AI-assisted content, the Article 50(4) machine-readable marking obligation requires technical implementation, not just a boilerplate disclosure in terms of service.