As an agency, are my clients' obligations mine?

The Act's provider/deployer framework attaches the disclosure duty to whoever "places a system on the market under its own name or brand." For most agency-built chatbots, that's the client (the end customer sees the client's brand, not the agency's), which means the client, not the agency, generally carries the Article 50(1) disclosure duty for that specific system.

We want to be precise about the limits of this: the source material we've verified describes the general provider/deployer definition, not an agency-specific worked example from the Commission. What follows is our reasoned application of that general rule, not a settled ruling on agency arrangements specifically. Treat it as a strong starting position, not a guarantee.

Three practical implications follow from that reasoning. First, disclosure should be a standard part of every client chatbot build, not an afterthought or an upsell: it's cheap, and leaving it out creates real exposure for the client whose name is on the product. Second, document per client who is contractually responsible for keeping the disclosure live over time, since redesigns, rebrands, and platform migrations are common ways it quietly disappears after launch; an agency that built it but doesn't maintain it shouldn't be assumed to be watching for that. Third, if an agency also operates or hosts the bot on an ongoing basis (not just building and handing it off), that arrangement can start to look more like actively running the system, which is worth thinking through separately rather than assuming the "we just built it" framing still applies.

If you run compliance builds across many clients, the practical fix is the same either way: bake the disclosure pattern into your standard build process so it's never a per-project decision, and keep a per-client record of what was shipped and when.