AI disclosure requirements in Germany: 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 Germany 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 Germany
Germany implements the AI Act through the KI-Marktüberwachungs- und Innovationsförderungsgesetz (KI-MIG), which entered into force on 29 July 2026 (per the Bundesnetzagentur's press release of 29 July 2026), after Germany missed the Act's 2 August 2025 deadline for designating national authorities. The Bundesnetzagentur (BNetzA) is now the central market surveillance authority and the central contact and complaints body for the AI Act, including for Article 50 transparency duties, with sector regulators such as BaFin keeping jurisdiction in their own domains, and a KoKIVO coordination centre inside BNetzA pooling cross-authority AI expertise. Article 50 itself applies from 2 August 2026, with the Act's penalty ceiling of €15M or 3% of worldwide turnover.
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.
Germany-specific practicalities
- BNetzA already runs market surveillance for telecoms and radio equipment, expect process-driven, documentation-heavy supervision now that the KI-MIG is in force, the style German regulators are known for
- Sector overlap is real: an AI feature inside a financial product answers to BaFin, not BNetzA, map which regulator owns your sector before assuming the central authority
- German consumer-protection and competition associations (Verbraucherzentralen, Wettbewerbszentrale) can pursue unfair-competition claims over misleading practices, an undisclosed AI chatbot is exactly the kind of gap they test, independent of the AI Act's own fines
- Keep your evidence file ready in German: screenshots of the German-language first-interaction state, plus your widget settings export with a date
Disclosure language should match your user-facing language. For a site serving Germany in German, a first-message line such as "Sie chatten mit einem KI-Assistenten" (you're chatting with an AI assistant) is the pattern to aim for, clear, at first interaction, not buried in an Impressum or ToS.
Common questions
Who enforces Article 50 in Germany right now?
The Bundesnetzagentur. The KI-MIG, which designates it as the central market surveillance authority and the central contact and complaints body for the AI Act, entered into force on 29 July 2026. Article 50 obligations apply from 2 August 2026, and the Commission's AI Office coordinates cross-border cases.
Does the German KI-MIG change what we have to disclose?
No. The KI-MIG is about who supervises and how, the substantive transparency duties come directly from Article 50 of the EU regulation and are identical across member states. What Germany adds is the enforcement route (BNetzA centrally, sector regulators like BaFin in their domains) and, in practice, an expectation of orderly documentation when a regulator asks.