Three Weeks Until Your Chatbots Have to Say They're Not Human
Plus: Google beats the Gemini "silent switch" privacy suit (for now), Google's white paper argues AI training can never infringe copyright — and a free quick-start assessment for checking any AI agent before it launches.
Here's what mattered most to me this week — the EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency duty bites on 2 August, three weeks from today. The high-risk obligations were delayed; this one wasn't. If any system your organisation runs talks to people or generates content someone might mistake for human-made, it needs to disclose itself from that date. To help you get ahead of exactly this kind of question, this week's issue includes our AI Agent Assessment Quick-Start — a plain-language, twelve-page risk check covering data protection, the EU AI Act, IP and more, split into what the agent-building process can complete itself and what a human must decide.
Or jump to: the AI Agent Assessment Quick-Start · this week's workshop video
This Week's Reading
Inventory first, then disclose. The question in-house teams should ask this week isn't "are we high-risk?" — it's "which of our systems talk to people or generate content, and do they say so?" Customer chatbots, HR screening assistants, marketing content pipelines: each needs either a disclosure or a documented reason it's out of scope. Section 2B of this week's assessment (below) walks through exactly these flags.
The lesson isn't that Google won — it's that default-on AI features in workplace tools are now litigation bait. Your organisation almost certainly has AI assistants switched on by default inside its productivity suite. Check what they can read, whether that's been assessed against your privacy notices and employment policies, and who approved the defaults. An amended complaint is coming; the underlying theory isn't going away.
Read your AI vendors' indemnities with this in mind. If providers succeed in shifting the infringement question to outputs, responsibility shifts towards how you use the tool. Check whether your vendor indemnities cover output infringement (many exclude it or condition it on using their filters), and make human review of externally published AI output — Section 3C.5 of this week's assessment — standard practice.
This Week's Workshop
Before Your Agent Goes Live: Running the AI Agent Assessment
Building an AI agent is getting easier every month — which means the governance question has moved from "can we build it?" to "should this one launch?" In this week's workshop, we walk through the AI Agent Assessment Quick-Start featured below: what the agent-building process can honestly complete for itself (the green sections — tools, data access, configuration), what must stay with a human (the red sections — lawful basis, risk classification, sign-off), and how to run the whole check in under an hour so the assessment happens before launch rather than after the first complaint.
Agent Builder Course — Five Days, One Hour a Day
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Book a CallThis Week's Resource: The AI Agent Assessment — Quick-Start
A plain-language, twelve-page risk check to run before any AI agent goes live. It brings four risk areas into one form — data protection (GDPR), the EU AI Act (updated for the 2026 Digital Omnibus changes covered above), intellectual property, and practical risks like security and reputation — and splits every item into two colours: green for what the agent-building process can complete automatically from the agent's actual configuration, and red for the judgment calls a human must own — lawful basis, risk classification, sign-off. It ends with a one-page sign-off table your DPO, security lead and senior owner can actually use. It's a governance and drafting aid, not legal advice — but it turns "have we thought about the risks?" from a meeting into a checklist.
Want More Prompts & Workflows?
For prompts and more detailed workflows like this one, take a look at our book on AI for legal professionals. Explore step-by-step guides, ready-to-use prompts, and best practices for integrating AI safely into your legal work.
Explore the Book →Until next Monday,
— Richard Nicholas
Got a story I should cover, or a question about something here? Just hit reply — I read every one. (Received this one secondhand? Reach me directly at [email protected].)
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