EU AI Act · Article 50(1) · Chat widgets

Crisp and the EU AI Act: does your chat widget tell people it's AI?

Applies from 2 Aug 2026Fines up to €15M / 3% turnoverLast reviewed July 2026

Crisp is a favorite of startups and indie SaaS: one lightweight widget, a shared inbox, and AI answers via its bot and MagicReply features. The same lightness is the compliance trap — Crisp deployments are usually configured once by a founder in an afternoon, and the AI features that shipped afterward were toggled on without anyone re-reading the first message a visitor sees.

The rule itself is short. Article 50(1) of the EU AI Act requires AI systems that interact directly with people to be designed so users know they're dealing with AI — no later than the first interaction, in a clear and distinguishable way. The exception for cases where it's "obvious" is narrow: a natural-language customer-service bot doesn't qualify just because it has a robot icon. A line in your terms of service doesn't satisfy it either. And it's easy to enforce, because a regulator can simply open your site and start a chat.

Who's on the hook? Responsibility is split: Crisp carries provider-side duties for the system itself, but how the widget is configured and presented on your site is your deployment. If the disclosure setting exists and isn't enabled — or the notice is hidden — that gap is yours.

Where the disclosure lives in Crisp

In a typical Crisp setup, the surfaces that can carry (or fail to carry) the AI disclosure are:

The chatbox and its default greeting text
The bot participant's name and avatar when AI scenarios respond
AI-generated replies (MagicReply-style suggestions sent as answers) in the thread
The moment a human teammate replies after the bot has been answering

Your Crisp disclosure checklist

Message your own site: does anything say 'AI' or 'bot' before or in the first response?
Give the bot an explicitly AI identity rather than the company name alone, which implies a human team
Add a disclosure line to the greeting or the bot's first scenario message
If teammates send AI-drafted replies under their own names, decide and document your policy — visitor-facing AI answers should be attributable as AI
Announce human takeover in-thread when a founder or teammate jumps in
Save a dated screenshot of the chatbox first-interaction state alongside your Crisp scenario settings

Keep proof. On a complaint, an authority will want to see that the disclosure was there and how it was designed. Keep timestamped screenshots of the first-interaction state, your widget configuration, and a record of when each was last changed — that evidence file is the difference between "we comply" and "we can show we complied."

Watch out for

Crisp's blended inbox makes it easy for AI-drafted text to go out under a human teammate's name — helpful for speed, murky for transparency. The clean rule: anything the visitor receives that a human didn't meaningfully author gets an AI attribution. Deciding that policy once, and writing it down, converts an ambiguity into a defensible position.

Note: vendor interfaces and setting names change. This page describes where disclosure surfaces typically live in Crisp as of July 2026 — verify the exact toggles in your own Crisp workspace and against Crisp's current documentation.

Common questions

Our bot only runs after-hours — do we need disclosure all the time?

Disclose whenever the AI is the one responding, which for after-hours bots means in that greeting and those replies. Time-based routing is fine; silent identity-swapping between human daytime and AI nighttime is what confuses visitors.

Is a robot emoji in the bot name enough?

Treat icons as decoration, not disclosure. The requirement is a clear, distinguishable statement — one plain sentence outperforms any emoji if it's ever examined.

Check it in one scan.

DisclosureProof opens your site the way a regulator would, triggers your Crisp widget, and records whether the AI disclosure actually appears — with timestamped evidence either way. Free scan at launch.

Join the launch list