My company is not in the EU — does Article 50 apply to me?

Short answer

"We are not an EU company" is not the test. The AI Act reaches providers and deployers established outside the Union when the output of their AI system is used inside it. If people in the EU chat with your bot, Article 50 is about you — the same way the GDPR became about companies that never opened a European office.

Why that is

The scope provision names third-country providers and deployers explicitly, with the connecting factor being the use of the system's output in the Union. Three things therefore do not decide the question, even though they are the three things people usually raise first: where the servers are, what the domain ends in, and where the company is incorporated. What decides it is whether people in the Union actually interact with the system. That cuts both ways, and the honest version of this answer includes the second half: a business with no users in the Union is not caught by Article 50, and nobody should be sold a fix for a duty they do not have. For most websites with a public chat widget, though, EU visitors are not a hypothesis — they are in the traffic log.

What this means in practice

Start with the factual question rather than the legal one: do EU visitors reach your chat? Your analytics already answer that. If they do, the disclosure belongs in the opening message, in the language the bot answers in. Multilingual widgets are the common trap here: the greeting is translated for some locales and left in English for others, so the disclosure silently disappears for exactly the visitors it was meant for. Check every language variant your widget serves, not just the default one.

Check it on your own page

The check loads your page from the outside, regardless of where it is hosted or who owns it — it sees what a reviewer in Europe would see. What it cannot tell you is whether you have EU users; that number is in your own statistics.

Related questions

• Does the EU AI disclosure duty apply to small websites and sole traders?
• The chat widget comes from a vendor — is it not their responsibility?
• What has applied since 2 August 2026 — and for whom is 2 December 2026 a transition deadline?