Glossary · EU AI Act: foundations
Risk-based approach (AI Act)
Also known as: risk pyramid, risk categories, risk levels
The risk-based approach of the EU AI Act assigns obligations according to the risk an AI system poses to health, safety and fundamental rights: unacceptable-risk practices are prohibited, high-risk systems must meet mandatory requirements, certain systems carry transparency obligations, and all other systems remain largely unregulated.
- AI regulation
- EU
In one sentence
The AI Act’s risk-based approach grades obligations: prohibited practices, high-risk requirements, transparency duties and minimal risk.
Example
An emotion-recognition system at the workplace is prohibited, a credit-scoring system is high-risk, a customer-service chatbot has transparency duties and a spam filter is minimal risk.
How it applies
- Four levels: Prohibited practices (unacceptable risk); high-risk AI systems with extensive requirements; systems with transparency obligations, such as chatbots and generators of synthetic content; and minimal-risk systems, which only need to meet the AI literacy duty and may follow voluntary codes of conduct.
- General-purpose AI: Models are regulated separately: all general-purpose AI models have documentation and copyright duties, models with systemic risk additional safety duties.
- Technical documentation: Start every AI documentation project with a classification: which level applies, why, and which exemptions were considered. That reasoning is itself part of the documentation.
Compared with the USA, Canada and China
The NIST AI RMF also uses risk as the organizing idea, but leaves it to each organization to judge and treat risk. Canada's Directive on Automated Decision-Making grades federal systems into impact levels I to IV. China's rules classify by influence: services with “public opinion attributes or social mobilization capacity” must file their algorithms and pass a security assessment.
Read more on AI TechDoc Press
The in-depth analysis behind this entry, in the AI TechDoc Press newsletter. Subscribe for free