The European Artificial Intelligence Board held its ninth meeting on 17 September 2026 under the chairmanship of the Irish Presidency of the Council, and the Commission published an account of it the following day. The agenda matters more to a practising lawyer than the account’s language. Three items on it touch obligations that already bind clients: the transparency duties applicable since 2 August 2026, cooperation between national market surveillance authorities, and the governance of pre-market conformity assessment. Moldova attended as an observer for the first time.
Transparency duties that already bind
Article 50 of the Artificial Intelligence Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, has applied since 2 August 2026. It requires providers of systems generating synthetic audio, image, video or text to mark the outputs in a machine-readable format, that is, in a form a detection tool can read rather than one a person notices. It requires deployers to disclose deepfakes, and to disclose artificially generated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest, unless that text has passed through human review or editorial control and a person holds editorial responsibility for it. On timing, Article 50(5) requires the information to reach the person concerned “in a clear and distinguishable manner at the latest at the time of the first interaction or exposure”, in the words of the Regulation.
The Commission reported to the Board on the two instruments supporting these rules. The Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content has one section for providers, on marking and detection, and one for deployers, on labelling deepfakes and generated text. Adherence is voluntary, and the Commission and the Board have confirmed the Code as an adequate voluntary tool, but Article 50 binds those who do not sign. Separate guidelines address the scope of the provision. A client that signs gains evidence of compliance, not an exemption.
Market surveillance and conformity assessment
The Board considered cooperation on market surveillance and the governance structures around pre-market conformity assessment, the procedure by which a system is checked against the Act’s requirements before it is placed on the market. It also weighed a secondment programme sending staff of market surveillance authorities to the European Data Protection Supervisor. Each Member State must appoint one or more market surveillance authorities and, where it appoints several, designate a single point of contact. Those authorities may conduct remote monitoring and obtain access to a provider’s documentation, data sets and source code, and must accept complaints from any natural or legal person with grounds to believe the Act has been infringed.
Frontier capabilities and cybersecurity
The Commission gave the Board an overview of new frontier capabilities, including recent incidents, and an update on the Action Plan on Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence published on 7 July 2026. That plan rests on three objectives: safe and responsible use of advanced AI, resilience of the Union, and European capabilities for cybersecurity. Under the first, the Commission undertakes to strengthen the capacity to evaluate models before they reach the EU market and to work with the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity on a secure testing platform for critical sectors.
What to watch
The tenth meeting of the Board is expected on 18 November, alongside the Apply AI Summit held in Brussels on 17 November. That summit closes the European AI Innovation Month, which opens on 14 October in Dublin. Advisers whose clients generate or publish synthetic content should treat this period as one of supervision rather than preparation, since the duty has bound them since August and the authorities charged with enforcing it are now organising themselves to act.
Sources: Article 50 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, AI Act Service Desk; AI Board holds its ninth meeting, European Commission; Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content, European Commission; Guidelines on transparency obligations, European Commission; Market Surveillance Authorities under the AI Act, European Commission; EU Action Plan on Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence, European Commission; The EU AI Act Newsletter, issue 111.