Web pages increasingly contain text produced with varying degrees of AI involvement — from AI-assisted editing to fully autonomous generation. Currently there is no standard HTML mechanism for authors to disclose AI involvement at element-level granularity within a page.
Problem
A news article page might contain a human-written investigation alongside an AI-generated summary sidebar. Existing approaches only support page-level disclosure (the <meta> tag proposed in whatwg/html#9479) or HTTP response-level signals (IETF draft-abaris-aicdh-00). Neither allows marking individual sections of a page, which is what 42+ commenters on the WHATWG issue identified as the key missing capability.
The EU AI Act Article 50 (effective August 2026) requires machine-readable marking of AI-generated text content, creating regulatory demand for exactly this kind of standard.
Proposed Solution
An HTML attribute ai-disclosure that can be applied to any element, with values aligned to the IETF AI-Disclosure header and IPTC Digital Source Type vocabulary:
<article> <section ai-disclosure="none"> <p>Our investigation found...</p> </section> <aside ai-disclosure="ai-generated" ai-model="gpt-4o"> <h3>AI Summary</h3> <p>The report concludes...</p> </aside> </article>
Values: none, ai-assisted, ai-generated, autonomous.
A page-level <meta name="ai-disclosure"> tag provides a default for pages with uniform disclosure status. Optional ai-model, ai-provider, and ai-prompt-url attributes provide additional context.
This complements (not replaces) the HTTP-layer IETF AI-Disclosure header and the cryptographic provenance approach of C2PA.
Explainer
Full explainer: https://github.com/dweekly/ai-content-disclosure