Witness 0.1.0 released

Witness 0.1.0 is out. It gives you the building blocks for the transparency duties in Article 50 of the EU AI Act: a chatbot notice, labels for AI content and machine-readable marking for images and text. @sweberdev/witness and @sweberdev/witness-react are on npm under the MIT licence.

Why

Article 50 has applied since 2 August 2026. People must know when they are talking to an AI system, generated content must be marked in a machine-readable way, and deepfakes and AI text on matters of public interest must be disclosed. For the machine-readable marking of systems that were already on the market before that date, the Digital Omnibus agreement gives time until 2 December 2026. Most of the tooling so far sits with the large model providers. Witness covers the part that ends up in your app: what visitors see, and what the files you publish carry.

Witness is a tool, not legal advice. It helps you implement the duties; it does not confirm compliance. The Article 50 summary in the docs lists who has which duty, with sources.

What is in 0.1.0

• <witness-notice>: a chatbot notice that stays expanded until the visitor acknowledges it, then shrinks to a compact label that can be reopened. It fires witness-shown and witness-acknowledged events you can keep as evidence.
• <witness-label>: a badge for AI-generated, AI-edited or deepfake content with a details popover, inline or as an overlay on an image.
• Image marking: XMP with the IPTC digital source type written straight into PNG, JPEG and WebP files, in the browser or on the server. Files that already carry a C2PA manifest are left untouched.
• An invisible text watermark that survives copy and paste and can be read back.
• Middleware for the Vercel AI SDK that marks text from generateText and streamText and images from generateImage as the model produces them.
• schema.org JSON-LD, meta tags and Next.js metadata for AI content.
• The witness CLI to mark images in a build step and inspect files.
• React components: <AiNotice>, <AiLabel>, <AiContent> and useAiDisclosure.
• Wording in English, German, French and Italian.

Install

pnpm add @sweberdev/witness @sweberdev/witness-react

Put the notice above your chat and wrap generated content:

import { AiNotice, AiContent } from "@sweberdev/witness-react"
import "@sweberdev/witness/styles.css"

export default function Chat() {
  return (
    <>
      <AiNotice kind="chatbot" id="support-chat" />
      <AiContent labelPosition="overlay" marking={{ kind: "generated", generator: "gpt-image-2" }}>
        <img src="/hero.png" alt="Beach at dusk" />
      </AiContent>
    </>
  )
}

Try the notice, the labels, the watermark and the image marking in the live demo. The full reference is at packages.sweber.dev/witness/docs.

Witness Pro

Witness Pro is for agencies that look after several client sites. It adds the notice and label wording in all 24 official EU languages, a CI scanner that fails the build when AI images or text lack a label or marking, and an AI register that turns into a transparency report for your client and a public "How we use AI" page. The demo shows its output for a made-up client. Licences start at 19 CHF a month for one person; see the package page for all plans.