Yes. The Act applies to actors outside the EU too, if their output is used within the EU. Being headquartered, incorporated, and run entirely from the US does not exempt you.
The trigger isn't where your company is based — it's whether your AI system's output (a chatbot response, generated content, published text) reaches people in the EU. A US company with EU customers, EU website visitors, or an EU-facing support chatbot is in scope in essentially the same way an EU-based company would be.
This matters most for the two duties SMEs actually run into: if your branded chatbot is available to EU visitors, the Article 50(1) disclosure duty likely applies to that interaction. If you publish AI-generated content — blog posts, images, video — that EU audiences can see, the Article 50(4) marking/labelling duties can apply on the same logic.
It doesn't matter whether you have a legal entity, employees, or any physical presence in the EU. The question is simpler and more direct: do EU-based people interact with your AI system's output? If yes, start there.
If you're unsure whether your company has meaningful EU exposure — a handful of overseas customers versus a real market — the free check starts with exactly that question and routes you from there.
There's no minimum-size or minimum-revenue carve-out built into this territorial test in the material we've verified — a two-person US startup with a handful of EU trial signups sits in the same basic position, on this specific question, as a large EU enterprise. That doesn't mean enforcement risk is identical (a separate, more realistic question covered elsewhere), only that the Act's reach isn't gated by company size.
This is a genuinely different design from some other digital regulations you may already be familiar with, several of which key off an EU legal presence or a minimum-user threshold before obligations attach. Article 50's territorial test is simpler and broader: it looks at where the output lands, not at your corporate footprint.
Not sure how this applies to your specific setup? The free 2-minute check tells you which of the four Article 50 duty areas likely apply to your company — no email required.
Take the free check Generate disclosure text