Glossary term
AI Act Risk Categories
Also: EU AI Act Risk Classes
Four-tier classification under the EU AI Act: prohibited (Art. 5), high-risk (Annex I/III), limited risk (Art. 50 transparency), minimal risk. Classification is the first duty; it must be documented and defensible.
Prohibited (since February 2025): social scoring, manipulative AI, real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces, emotion recognition in workplaces and education, untargeted scraping of facial images.
High-risk Annex III: AI in employment, education, credit scoring, insurance risk, law enforcement, migration, critical infrastructure, justice, democratic processes, biometric categorisation. High-risk Annex I: AI as safety component in regulated products (machinery, medical devices, toys, lifts).
In practice
Limited risk: chatbots, deepfakes, emotion recognition, biometric categorisation, AI-generated content (with labelling). Minimal risk: everything else. Classification must be documented; the EU authority can revise the classification at any time.
Related terms
EU AI Act
World's first comprehensive AI law. Four risk classes: prohibited, high-risk, limited (transparency), minimal. Phased application from February 2025 to August 2028.
FRIA
Mandatory assessment under EU AI Act Art. 27 for deployment of specific high-risk AI systems. Required for public bodies and private deployers of essential services before first use.
AI Act Conformity Assessment
Procedure to demonstrate that a high-risk AI system complies with the EU AI Act before being placed on the market or put into service. Mandatory for all Annex III high-risk systems from 2 December 2027 (postponed from the original 2 August 2026 by the Digital Omnibus, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744).
Audit-ready decision
A decision whose record is structured, evidence-backed and stakeholder-signed to a level that a third-party auditor, a supervisor or a board reviewer can reconstruct the reasoning without interviewing the original team.
BAIT
BaFin circular that concretises IT requirements for credit institutions. Specifies MaRisk AT 7.2 for IT strategy, information security, user permissions, project management, application development, and IT outsourcing.
BCM
Discipline for maintaining critical business processes during disruptions. Standards: ISO 22301, BSI Standard 200-4. Mandatory under BAIT/VAIT and DORA Art. 11 in the financial sector.
BSI C5
Cloud audit catalogue of the German BSI that defines minimum security baseline and transparency duties. Evidenced via an ISAE 3000 C5 attestation. De facto standard for cloud procurement in the German market.
CASB
Security layer between users and SaaS providing visibility (shadow IT discovery), data protection (DLP), compliance, and threat protection across SaaS apps. Four functions per Gartner: visibility, compliance, data security, threat protection.