concerning law enforcement exemptions in the draft AI act transparency guidelines | ava's blog

concerning law enforcement exemptions in the draft AI act transparency guidelines

25 May, 2026

I've finished reading the Draft Guidelines for transparency requirement under the AI Act that are out for comment until the 3rd of June, and a variety of exemptions for law enforcement and similar actors greatly concern me. I haven't seen media pick this up in any meaningful way, but this should be highlighted and discussed.

☁️☁️☁️<br>A short explanation upfront:

Transparency requirements under Art. 50 AI Act refer to providers (and some deployers)1 of AI systems intended to interact directly with natural persons needing to make sure that the users are informed about interacting with an AI system, and outputs being marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated. That covers, for example, AI-enabled voice assistants, chatbots in various settings (even on social media), (humanoid) robots and AI companions, AI avatars, coding agents and agentic AI systems.

Depending on the provision, transparency can be done via direct disclosure to users (such as banners, pop-ups, notices, voice announcements or chatbot messages), or machine-readable marking and detectability mechanisms for AI-generated content, sometimes complemented by visible labels or watermarks. Simply stating it in Terms of Service, documentation or else, or having a non-visible watermark, is not enough to inform users. This needs to happen at the very first interaction as latest point. Obviousness-exceptions apply.

☁️☁️☁️<br>Throughout the document, law enforcement and related actors get several exemptions, starting with 3.2.2 Exception for AI systems authorised by law for law enforcement purposes , points 43-46, page 15, emphasis mine:

Providers of interactive AI systems are exempted from the transparency obligation under Article 50(1) AI Act, if they are authorised by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offences, subject to appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms of third parties.

[...]

To fall within this exception, the purpose of the AI system must be to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offences (e.g. AI-undercover agent ). The exception is not restricted to the use of such AI systems only by law enforcement authorities as defined in Article 3(48) AI Act, but may also cover interactive (or generative) AI systems used by other EU or national public authorities or even private actors, such as security companies or financial institutions , so long as their use is authorised by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offences and subject to appropriate safeguards to protect the rights and freedoms of third parties.

Or point 87 , 4.3. Exceptions to the obligations under Article 50(2) AI Act, page 23, about labeling and detection:

Finally, if a generative AI system is authorised by law to generate or manipulate synthetic content to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offences, it will be exempted from the marking and detection requirements under Article 50(2) AI Act.

Or point 103 , 5.2. Out of scope, page 26, for emotion recognition and biometric systems:

The obligation does not apply to emotion recognition systems and biometric<br>categorisation systems that are permitted by law to detect, prevent or investigate criminal offences subject to appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms of third parties and in accordance with Union law.

Or point 117 , 6.1.4. Exception for law enforcement, page 31:

If the use of a deep fake is authorised by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offences, deployers are fully exempted from the transparency obligation under Article 50(4) AI Act.

The way it looks right now, AI systems used by law enforcement (and related actors, like security companies!) to detect, prevent or investigate crime will be exempt from several core Article 50 transparency obligations, meaning any labeling, marking or disclosure that you are interacting with AI or that you are seeing deepfake content when it is used against you.

As it stands, this enables the use AI chatbots posing as real people against investigation targets without having to tell them, and permits the use of synthetic or deepfake-style content towards targets without having to label it as such. The only exception: The bot is available to the general public and offers functionalities for people to report crimes (meaning: a police chatbot recording your complaint, virtual assistants for witness statement collection, or an AI fraud reporting hotline, for example).

Obviously, officers posing as ordinary citizens, lying during proceedings and the entire concept of V-men, etc. is nothing new. However, I am deeply uncomfortable with a future in which LE and specific private actors just get a pass to deceive people with extremely...