The EU AI Act became enforceable on 2 August 2026. Most ecommerce teams have spent the summer worrying about AI labelling requirements on their product pages. The regulation that actually binds them shipped in April 2024, inside the Google Merchant Center feed spec — not from Brussels. The EU Act’s text-labelling duty almost certainly does not apply to your product descriptions. The rule that does apply has been live for over two years, and most stores are quietly non-compliant. This article is a companion to the technical breakdown of AI watermarking and Article 50, which covers mechanism and the three-layer regulatory structure in full. Read that first or after — you can follow this piece either way.

A writer drafts a 1,200-word analysis piece. The ideas are entirely their own — the structure, the argument, the research. They run the draft through Claude to catch awkward phrasing and tighten two passages. Then they publish. The published text now carries an imperceptible, statistically embedded mark indicating that a language model processed it. The ideas have not changed. The mark cannot be seen by any reader, cannot be read by any tool without Anthropic’s private key, and cannot be stripped without degrading the text. Nothing about who thought what has been recorded.