EU AI Policy Observatory

Published document record

Draft high-risk classification guidelines — General principles

PDF source copies

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    Draft high-risk classification guidelines — General principles. Consultation draft — General principles.

    Source: European Commission. Retrieved 2026-09-10.

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    SHA-256: b127bbdc50b1741bb2d97e8aff5839cccd1a4484445be4e8cca246c12541fc42

Official metadata

Official title
Draft Commission Guidelines on the classification of high-risk AI systems — General principles
Document type
Guidelines
Document date
2026-05-19
Document date kind
Publication
Document-date evidence
European Commission · Publication 19 May 2026; paragraph immediately above Downloads; Downloads 1-3. — Establishes 2026-05-19 as the dated publication of the shared draft consultation work and this separately supplied section, not a formal adoption date.
Publication date
2026-05-19
Publication-date evidence
European Commission · Publication 19 May 2026; paragraph immediately above Downloads; Downloads 1-3. — Establishes an official Commission publication date for this section within the jointly published consultation work.
Version label
Consultation draft — General principles
Legal status
Non binding
Legal-status evidence
European Commission · PDF page 3 / printed page 2, paragraphs 3-7 identify draft guidelines for consultation and explain their non-binding interpretive character. — Supports the retained draft version and non-binding legal status; the placeholder cover supplies no adopted communication reference.
Language
en

Research classifications

These are researcher classifications used to organise and analyse the corpus; they are not official EU metadata.

Record level
Attachment
Version status
Draft
Temporal collection
Contemporary EU AI policy
Relevance class
Direct AI relevance
Policy stage
Consultation
Corpus tier
Core
Sectors
  • General cross sector
Policy membership
  • AI Act implementation
  • EU AI policy pathway

Classification evidence

  • Relevance class: Direct AI relevance · European Commission · PDF page 3 / printed page 2, paragraphs 3-7 describe the draft guidelines' interpretation of Article 6 of the AI Act. — This section directly interprets the AI Act's high-risk classification rules.
  • Sector tags: General cross sector · European Commission · PDF page 3 / printed page 2, paragraphs 3-7 introduce horizontal Article 6 classification principles and the two separately supplied sector-spanning sections. — The General principles section applies across the high-risk categories rather than to one sector.
  • Provenance tags: Authored by an EU institution · European Commission · PDF page 1 cover carries the European Commission masthead. — The exact section is authored by the European Commission.
  • Provenance tags: Official consultation material · European Commission · Official library publication dated 19 May 2026 presents the three section downloads as draft guidelines for consultation. — The Commission issued the section as material for the targeted consultation.
  • Provenance tags: Officially published · European Commission · Official library Publication 19 May 2026 and Downloads 1-3. — The Commission library officially publishes this section as part of the consultation work.

Production provenance

Provenance tags
  • Authored by an EU institution
  • Official consultation material
  • Officially published
Named bibliographic authors
None recorded after review
Institutions and roles

Official sources and identifiers

Parent or principal record

Research assessment

Inclusion rationale
Verified official English text within the AI Act implementation and amendment corpus.
Researcher notes
Official metadata is transcribed from the cited source; corpus tier and policy-stage classification are researcher assessments. On 2026-09-05, AI-assisted reviewer editorially corrected record_level from version to attachment because the Commission landing page presents General principles as one separately downloadable section of the draft guidelines; a represented whole-guidelines endpoint was not verified, and the linked binary interior was not reviewed. Subsequent file-level review by AI-assisted reviewer at 2026-09-05T08:20:53Z: retrieved official PDF 128559 and recorded its real SHA-256 and local file-write-completion timestamp (an operational retrieval-time proxy). Cover and first body page reviewed, not all six pages. Cover identifies an annex to a draft Commission communication; body identifies the shared guidelines, general principles and a draft disclaimer. The review copy is local only, not a committed archive. This narrow review does not reverify the other metadata or classifications. 2026-09-06 expanded-evidence update: the independently evidenced whole consultation-work parent, official part_of edge, publication-date citations, complete classification/role evidence and retained official receipts now complete this section's historical-readiness review without inferring a numbered communication or altering the prior personal review credit.
Review status
verified

Relationships

Verification

Expanded evidence review
Verified
Reviewed by
Yichen Hao
Evidence review date
2026-09-04T00:00:00Z

The evidence review date is not a separate human sign-off date. Review credit and evidence-review actions

  • Last verified: 2026-09-05T08:20:53Z · AI-assisted reviewer retrieved this official download with normal TLS verification. The 260362-byte response is a 6-page PDF, confirmed by PDF signature, Poppler and pypdf despite the malformed HTTP Content-Type value '/'. SHA-256: b127bbdc50b1741bb2d97e8aff5839cccd1a4484445be4e8cca246c12541fc42. retrieved_at uses observed UTC local file-write completion immediately following download as an operational retrieval-time proxy; it does not claim precise HTTP timing and is not the publication date. Cover and first body page reviewed, not all six pages. Cover identifies an annex to a draft Commission communication; body identifies the shared guidelines, general principles and a draft disclaimer. Original bytes exist only in a local ignored review directory; no committed archive is claimed. Exact observation limits and timestamps are recorded in research/migrations/2026-09-05-official-pdf-evidence.json.
  • Last verified: 2026-09-05T08:20:53Z · Official page published 19 May 2026 provides three separate consultation-draft files: general principles, Annex I and Annex III guidance (newsroom documents 128559, 128560 and 128561). These downloads are presented as drafts; this bounded review does not establish the absence of every possible final successor. Narrow verification on 2026-09-05 checked the landing-page structure, stated purposes and download labels recorded in research/migrations/2026-09-05-relationship-evidence-migration.json; linked binary file interiors and retained bytes were not verified in this review, and no source snapshot was retained. Follow-up by AI-assisted reviewer at 2026-09-05T08:20:53Z: actual linked PDF bytes were retrieved and narrowly inspected; individual source records, checksums, selected page locators and local-only retention are recorded in research/migrations/2026-09-05-official-pdf-evidence.json. This supplements the earlier landing-page review; it is not a full-field or all-page re-verification, and unresolved relationship holds remain.

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