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Guide

The EU AI Act in Poland: What Online Shops Must Disclose

AI Act

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, applies directly in Poland. Because it is an EU regulation, it takes effect without waiting for a separate Polish law, so a shop in Warsaw, Kraków or Wrocław faces the same core obligations as one anywhere in the Union. For online retailers the practical message is about transparency: be honest about the AI your customers encounter.

Most shops are not developing high-risk AI. In the Act’s terms you are a deployer of everyday tools such as chatbots and image generators, and the provision that matters to you is Article 50. This guide explains it from a Polish standpoint.

The same regulation across the EU

As a regulation, the AI Act has identical substance in Poland, Germany, the Netherlands and everywhere else; there is no separate “Polish AI Act” rewriting the rules. What Poland decides is enforcement. Member States designate their own national competent and market-surveillance authorities, and in Poland this designation is still being finalised. Rather than wait for the regulator to be named, the sensible course is to comply with the transparency rules themselves.

The Act applies in phases: prohibited practices from 2 February 2025, general-purpose AI model obligations from 2 August 2025, and most high-risk rules from 2 August 2026. Article 50 transparency is the part a typical shop should focus on now.

What Article 50 asks of shops

The principle behind Article 50 is that customers should know when they face a machine or machine-made content. For a shop the duties are concrete.

  • Tell people when they are interacting with an AI system such as a chatbot, unless it is obvious.
  • Label AI-generated or AI-altered images, audio and video as artificial.
  • Disclose deep fakes as artificially generated or manipulated.
  • Mark certain AI-generated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest.

The disclosure should be clear and given no later than the first interaction.

Giving the information in Polish

The AI Act does not name a mandatory language, but it works alongside Polish and EU consumer protection expectations. If you sell to Polish consumers, transparency information should be understandable to them, which in practice means Polish. A chatbot notice offered only in English on an otherwise Polish-language shop risks failing the “clear and comprehensible” test. The simple fix is to present the disclosure in Polish, for example a line such as “Rozmawiasz z wirtualnym asystentem”.

A practical checklist for Polish shops

  • Add a visible chatbot notice in Polish wherever an AI assistant greets customers.
  • Review your visuals and label any AI-generated product or marketing images.
  • Consider how AI-written descriptions or reviews are presented.
  • Keep a short internal record of the AI tools you use and how each is disclosed.

Where to read more

For the wider background, see our overview of the EU AI Act and our complete AI Act guide.

This article is educational, not legal advice.