EU AI Act Compliance Guide for Advertisers Released
With the EU AI Act's main provisions just months from enforcement, a new compliance guide for advertisers has been released. The guide stresses that any AI tools used for political ads or campaign messaging in the EU must feature risk classification, transparency, labeling, and auditable user controls.
The EU AI Act introduces a tiered-risk framework with significant penalties for non-compliance, creating major new obligations for any company using AI to target European audiences. Fines for violations can reach up to €35 million or 7% of a company's global annual turnover, whichever is higher, surpassing even the stringent penalties of GDPR. The Act categorizes AI systems into four risk levels: unacceptable, high, limited, and minimal. Unacceptable-risk applications, such as government-run social scoring and certain types of predictive policing, are outright banned. High-risk systems, including those used in recruitment or critical infrastructure, face stringent requirements like risk management systems, data governance, and human oversight. Most advertising and campaign technologies will likely fall into the "limited risk" category, which mandates transparency. This means users must be clearly informed when they are interacting with an AI system, like a chatbot, or viewing AI-generated content. For political advertising specifically, the rules are even stricter. Deepfakes and other AI-manipulated content must be explicitly labeled as artificial. Furthermore, another EU regulation on political advertising, which comes into effect on October 10, 2025, will require disclosure of the ad sponsor, the amounts paid, and the targeting techniques used. The timeline for compliance is staggered. The ban on prohibited AI practices took effect in February 2025. Rules governing general-purpose AI models will apply from August 2025, with full compliance for most high-risk systems required by August 2026. The regulation strictly curtails certain data usage for targeting. Profiling based on special categories of personal data, such as political opinions or ethnic origin, is prohibited without explicit and separate consent. Additionally, to combat foreign interference, ads funded by non-EU sponsors are banned in the three months leading up to an election or referendum.
