The EU AI Act, content provenance & your work
What changes in 2026 — and where a timestamped record fits
From August 2026 the EU AI Act brings content-provenance and transparency duties into force. This page explains, plainly, what the law actually requires, who it applies to, and how a Creation Certificate relates to it. It is background information, not legal advice.
The Act’s transparency rules (Article 50) ask AI providers and deployers to make AI involvement visible:
- Providers of generative AI must mark AI-generated output in a machine-readable way — watermarks, or metadata such as C2PA Content Credentials.
- Deployers must disclose when content — text, image, audio or video — has been AI-generated or AI-manipulated.
- These duties fall on the AI provider and the deployer — not on an individual creator proving their own human work.
If you make your own work, the AI Act does not require you to register or mark it — copyright already arises automatically on creation. What is changing is the environment: provenance metadata is becoming an expected, machine-readable part of how files travel. Being able to show, with a date, that a work existed and how it was made is increasingly useful — in disputes, in licensing, and in simply being believed.
A Creation Certificate gives you dated, independently-verifiable evidence that an exact file existed in a given form — a priority date you can point to in a dispute. It is not an AI Act compliance product, and it does not register copyright. It is supporting evidence and a provenance record: it timestamps your file and your own declaration of how it was made.
Every certificate records an authorship declaration — human, AI-assisted, or mainly AI-generated — inside the timestamped record itself, so the declaration cannot be quietly changed later. Declaring AI use honestly is good practice and keeps your record credible. The declaration is your statement; Timbrica does not verify it.
This page is general information, not legal advice, and a Creation Certificate does not make you “AI Act compliant”. The Act’s obligations apply to AI providers and deployers; for advice on your situation, consult a qualified professional. What the certificate gives you is solid, independently-verifiable evidence of a date — nothing more, and nothing less.
