Under the EU AI Act (2024), AI companies are obliged to mark text generated by their LLMs as of August 2nd 2026. This means that companies who signed the EU Code of Practice on Transparency are introducing ways to do so. Failure to comply with text-marking could result in fines of up to €15 million, or 3% of worldwide annual turnover. Much coverage has been given to Claude’s announced rollout of watermarking. In reality there’s actually very little to say.

The board asked for an AI strategy. What they got was a vendor presentation dressed in strategy's clothes. The vocabulary is being set by people with a commercial interest in your confusion. AI is not complicated. The industry around it is. What follows is the version of this conversation that the hyperbolic presentations skip. Here's the AI landscape for executives.