Provider or deployer?
Article 50 does not put every obligation on the same party. Paragraph (1) — the chat disclosure — binds providers. Paragraphs (3) and (4) bind deployers. If you build chat widgets for clients, which one you are decides whose problem this is.
The definitions
Article 3(3):
'provider' means a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body that develops an AI system or a general-purpose AI model or that has an AI system or a general-purpose AI model developed and places it on the market or puts the AI system into service under its own name or trademark, whether for payment or free of charge;
Article 3(4):
'deployer' means a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body using an AI system under its authority except where the AI system is used in the course of a personal non-professional activity;
The four words that close the usual escape route
"whether for payment or free of charge."
The most common agency response to Article 50 is some version of: we didn't sell them the AI, we just set it up. Free provision does not exit the provider definition. It is written into the text precisely to stop that argument.
Three situations, three different answers
1. You installed a third-party widget under the client's brand
You configured Intercom or Tidio for a client. The vendor developed the system and placed it on the market — the vendor is normally the provider. Your client, using it under their authority, is normally the deployer.
So Article 50(1) is the vendor's obligation. That is genuinely good news, and it is also why the first step in every one of our recipes is check whether the platform can show the disclosure from its own settings — often it can, and then this is a config change, not a project.
Being off the hook legally is not the same as being off the hook commercially. Your client is asking you, and "not my obligation" is a bad answer to a question that takes ten minutes to actually fix.
2. You built a custom widget on an API
You wired up an OpenAI or Anthropic API, wrote the prompt, built the UI, put it live under your name or your client's. You have developed an AI system and put it into service. You are squarely inside Article 3(3), free of charge or not.
This is also the case where you can fully comply, because you control the markup and the system prompt — which is what the check nobody passes requires.
3. You white-labelled someone else's system as your own product
You resell a chat product under your own name or trademark. Read Article 3(3) again slowly. "Places it on the market or puts the AI system into service under its own name or trademark" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Why the Commission's framing matters here
Article 50(1) does not say "display a notice". It says providers shall ensure systems are designed and developed such that people are informed. The guidelines reinforce it at paragraph (33): the mechanism
should be embedded in the design and development of the system and in the way the system interacts with the natural persons
and providers are responsible for ensuring people are informed "throughout the lifecycle of the AI system". That is a build-time responsibility, which is precisely why it lands on people who build things — and why an agency is usually better placed to fix it than the client who is asking.
What we are not telling you
Which one you are in your specific arrangement. That depends on your contracts, your branding, and what you actually built, and it is a legal question about your business rather than an engineering one. What we can do is put the definitions in front of you and tell you where the line generally falls. If real money or real risk turns on the answer, ask a lawyer — that is not a disclaimer reflex, it is the honest recommendation.