On 17th on June 2026, EBU and a coalition of private broadcasters and sales houses (VAUNET, ACT, egta, AER, AKTV, APR and Privatsender) sent a joint letter to Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, responsible for the European Commission's digital portfolio. The letter responds to the draft guidelines the Commission published in May on the implementation of the transparency obligations in Article 50 of the AI Act, in particular the disclosure of deepfake content to audiences. While we welcome the Commission's effort to provide clarity, draft guidelines raise serious concerns that they may be disproportionate, technically difficult to apply and ultimately counterproductive.

"The draft defines deepfakes so broadly that broadcasters could end up labelling large amounts of non-deceptive content. If warning messages become ubiquitous, people will stop noticing them, and labels will lose their meaning exactly where it matters most. That is not what the AI Act set out to do.” said Sophia Wistehube, Senior Legal Counsel, EBU.

“We share the Commission’s goal of protecting audiences from genuinely misleading content, and we are asking for some targeted changes so the guidelines would actually deliver that." said François Lavoir, Senior Policy Adviser, EBU.

In the letter, we set out three main requests:

• Narrowing and clarifying the deepfake definition so that it captures only content presenting a real risk of deception and explicitly excludes fictitious, non-deceptive content.
• Clarifying the timing of disclosure to avoid continuous or persistent labelling obligations.
• Ensuring that labelling standards are proportionate and technically workable, taking into account of the limits of human perception as well as the fact that media service providers already operate under strict editorial standards and human editorial responsibility.

Read the full letter to the right.