Publishing in Germany: the UWG hits before the AI Act

Since August 2, 2026, publishers working in Europe have been looking at article 50 of the AI regulation and wondering what they have to disclose. For those publishing in Germany, the question is framed wrong. The text that can halt a campaign within days is not the European regulation, whose enforcement depends on authorities still being set up. It is a German law whose text goes back to 1909, recast in 2004 and revised since, that competitors enforce themselves: the law against unfair competition, the UWG. A publisher producing text and visuals for the German market has to know it before worrying about the AI Act.

What sets Germany apart: enforcement is private

In the United States, a deceptive practice is policed by the Federal Trade Commission under Section 5 of the FTC Act, and a competitor can sue under Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act, but that means federal litigation, slow and expensive. In Germany, § 8 of the UWG gives standing to act directly to competitors, to qualified trade associations and to consumer associations. No authority opens the file or prosecutes. One administration is in the loop upstream, though: a trade association can act only if it is entered on the register of qualified trade associations kept and published by the Bundesamt für Justiz, and a competitor only if it trades "to a not insignificant degree and not merely occasionally" (§ 8(3) no. 1).

The mechanism is well worn: the competitor or the association sends a formal notice, the Abmahnung, together with a cease-and-desist declaration to be signed and a contractual penalty should it happen again. If the publisher does not sign, an injunction can be obtained in summary proceedings, within days. There is no investigation, no examination period, no prior letter from an administration. The regime is less mechanical than it looks since the act strengthening fair competition: § 13(4) of the UWG rules out reimbursement of legal costs to a competitor acting against a breach of statutory information and labelling duties committed in electronic commerce or in a digital service. An Abmahnung based on a missing online disclosure therefore does not get paid for; it still stops the publication. The same visual, published in Chicago and in Munich, is not exposed in the same way.

§ 5 covers images, not only words

§ 5 of the UWG prohibits misleading commercial practices, and defines deception through "indications" that are false or liable to mislead. The German term, Angaben, is not limited to text: an image, a staged scene, a composite are indications within the meaning of the law. The paragraph lists the characteristics on which deception is penalized, and one of them bears directly on AI-assisted production: the results to be expected from using the product.

A visual showing a product in a situation where it would not deliver that result, a job site presented as completed when it never existed, a fabricated before-and-after performance shot, a testimonial filmed with a synthetic face, are misleading under § 5, whether or not AI was used to produce them. The law judges the effect on the public, independently of the tool employed. The table below says deepfake, the regulation's own term.

The table shows the two regimes converging on the same cases, with the UWG biting wider: a visual can sit outside the scope of the deepfake rule and remain misleading, and it can be misleading without any AI having touched it.

What changes on September 27, 2026

European directive 2024/825, known as "Empowering Consumers", requires member states to adopt new rules against misleading environmental claims. Germany transposed it through a third law amending the UWG, adopted on February 12, 2026 and published in the Federal Law Gazette on February 19, 2026, applicable on September 27, 2026. The firms Sievers & Kollegen and Boehmert & Boehmert have published detailed analyses of it.

The reform introduces a legal definition of the environmental claim and adds several outright prohibitions to the UWG blacklist, the ones penalized with no need to show that anyone was actually deceived:

• generic environmental claims, "ecological", "green", "environmentally friendly", with no demonstrated excellent environmental performance;
• a claim covering the whole product when a single one of its aspects justifies it;
• future commitments on environmental performance with no detailed, verifiable, dated implementation plan checked by a third party;
• carbon neutrality founded on emissions offsetting;
• sustainability labels that rest on neither a certification scheme nor a determination by a public authority.

For an industrial group, a materials manufacturer, an energy or mobility player, this is the subject that fills the autumn of 2026. AI has nothing to do with it. But AI-assisted editorial production multiplies the places where an environmental claim can turn up: an adjective in an introduction, a closing sentence about recyclability, an image caption. Past five hundred articles, nobody rereads them all by hand.

The unsettled point: is the AI Act actionable by a competitor?

An open question bears directly on publishers: is article 50 of regulation 2024/1689 a rule intended to govern market conduct within the meaning of § 3a of the UWG? If the answer is yes, failing to meet the deepfake disclosure obligation would become an unfair practice, actionable by a competitor through an Abmahnung, long before any regulator moves. To our knowledge, no published decision has settled it to this day. A cautious publisher draws a simple conclusion from it: on the German market, the production rule on visuals has to be held tighter than elsewhere, because the first party to complain will be no authority, but the competitor with the most to gain from doing so.

One production rule for two regimes

Both texts are covered by the same discipline, taken upstream rather than at the moment of publishing. We described it for images in "C2PA and SynthID"; It holds here too, but the list is not the same: only one of its three points reappears, the refusal of misleading realism, and three points specific to the German market are added.

1. No misleading realism. No fabricated customer reference, no job site presented as completed when it never existed, no before-and-after performance shot, no identifiable building, no real person, no testimonial with a generated face. An openly editorial style is at once more distinctive and far less exposed to either text.
2. Every environmental claim traces back to a document. An environmental product declaration, a certification, a test report. If the document does not exist, the claim does not get published, even when it is true. The check happens at review, with no extra step.
3. A named reviewer per market. The person who validates content intended for Germany knows the UWG, or works with someone who does. The signatory validation circuit we describe in "One article, one signatory" is where that competence plugs in.
4. A reference base that carries the authorized claims. When the facts and the positions come from a shared reference base, the validated environmental claims are recorded there, with their source document, and the others are ruled out there. The model doing the writing can then use only what is authorized, and review checks that it added nothing.

The date to add to a publisher's calendar

The calendar we published for the AI Act, in "The AI Act: the 2026-2027 timeline", places the deadlines that weigh on a publisher in August 2026 and at the end of 2026. For a publisher who publishes in Germany, one date joins them and comes ahead of the others: September 27, 2026 for environmental claims, with an enforcement regime that leaves no time to fix things after the fact. Rereading existing content on that point, to withdraw it or to document it, should be done before that date. On new production, the production rule above is enough, provided it is applied to every piece of content and not to campaigns alone.

The general principle holds beyond Germany: the sector and national texts that existed before AI apply to what AI produces, without waiting for a dedicated regulation to come into force. Advertising law, consumer law, trademark law and copyright were not suspended while the AI Act made its way. A publisher who organizes production around a reference base, a named review and a rule on visuals reduces its exposure on all four fronts at once, and does not have to redo the exercise with each new text. This discipline is not a finding of compliance: it treats the common cause, not each sectoral obligation.