AI disclosure requirements in Belgium: what applies since 2 August 2026
The EU AI Act's transparency obligations are a Union-wide regulation, so the substance is the same in Belgium as everywhere in the EU: from 2 August 2026, AI systems that interact with people must disclose they're AI, synthetic media must carry machine-readable marking, and deepfakes and certain AI-generated public-interest text must be labeled. What differs country by country is who enforces it, in what language your users encounter it, and how quickly complaints turn into questions.
Enforcement in Belgium
Belgium designated the BIPT (the federal telecoms regulator, Institut belge des services postaux et des télécommunications / Belgisch Instituut voor postdiensten en telecommunicatie) as its main AI Act regulator in January 2025, but the full national competent-authority structure was still being completed at the time of review, Belgium missed the Act's 2 August 2025 designation deadline and work on the complete supervisory map continues. Article 50 applies from 2 August 2026 regardless, with the EU penalty ceiling of €15M or 3% of worldwide turnover, and Belgium's data protection authority (APD/GBA) remains competent wherever your AI feature processes personal data.
The four duties, as they show up on your site
- Article 50(1): chatbot disclosure
- Any AI system interacting with visitors must make that clear no later than the first interaction, in a clear and distinguishable way.A line in your terms doesn't satisfy it.
- Article 50(2): machine-readable marking
- AI-generated audio, images, video, and text must be marked in a machine-readable, detectable format.For generative systems already on the market before 2 Aug 2026, this specific duty has a transition until 2 Dec 2026; the rest does not.
- Article 50(3): emotion recognition & biometric categorisation
- People exposed must be informed the system is operating.
- Article 50(4): deepfake and AI-text labels
- Visible disclosure for deepfakes, and for AI-generated or manipulated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest.
Belgium-specific practicalities
- BIPT is a technical regulator with market-surveillance experience from telecoms, machine-readable marking (50(2)) is the kind of check it knows how to run
- Belgium's incomplete designation map does not delay the duties: the regulation binds directly, and cross-border complaints can be coordinated via the Commission's AI Office in the meantime
- Belgium is multilingual by law in consumer matters, plan the disclosure for the language of the storefront (Dutch, French, and German where relevant), not just English
- The APD/GBA complaint route exists today for anything personal-data-adjacent; an undisclosed chatbot that profiles users can arrive as a GDPR complaint long before an AI Act one
Disclosure language should match your user-facing language, in Belgium that often means two: "Je chat met een AI-assistent" for Dutch-language pages and "Vous discutez avec un assistant IA" for French-language ones, each at first interaction.
Common questions
Belgium hasn't finished designating authorities, are we off the hook until it does?
No. Article 50 is directly applicable EU law from 2 August 2026; national designation decides who enforces locally, not whether the duty exists. BIPT is already named as the main regulator, and the data protection authority is competent today for the personal-data side of the same systems.
Which language does our chatbot disclosure need in Belgium?
Match the language of the interface. A storefront served in Dutch and French should disclose in Dutch and French respectively, the notice has to be clear to the user reading it, and consumer-facing language rules in Belgium make single-language notices a bad bet.