Draft Annex III high-risk classification guidelines

Official metadata

Official title

Draft Commission Guidelines on the classification of high-risk AI systems — Annex III systems

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 publication date of the shared consultation work and this separately supplied Annex III systems section.

Publication date

2026-05-19

Publication-date evidence

European Commission · Publication 19 May 2026; paragraph immediately above Downloads; Downloads 1-3. — Establishes official Commission publication of this section on 2026-05-19, not formal adoption of a numbered communication.

Version label

Consultation draft — Annex III

Legal status

Non binding

Legal-status evidence

European Commission · PDF pages 1-4 identify the section as draft guidelines and include the consultation draft disclaimer. — Supports the retained draft version and non-binding status without inferring a reference or adoption from cover placeholders.

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
• Health
• Employment and labour
• Migration asylum and border management
• Financial services
• Transport and mobility
• Law enforcement
• Justice
• Education
• Public administration
• Critical infrastructure

Policy membership

• AI Act implementation
• EU AI policy pathway

Classification evidence

• Relevance class: Direct AI relevance · European Commission · PDF pages 2-4 contents and Section IV body address Article 6(2) and the AI Act Annex III high-risk use cases. — The section directly interprets substantive AI Act high-risk classification.
• Sector tags: General cross sector · European Commission · PDF pages 2-4 contents enumerate Annex III use cases across infrastructure, education, employment, services, enforcement, migration and justice. — The section spans the full horizontal Annex III taxonomy.
• Sector tags: Critical infrastructure · European Commission · Section IV.3.2, printed pages 38-47. — The body expressly covers critical infrastructure high-risk use cases.
• Sector tags: Transport and mobility · European Commission · Section IV.3.2.3, printed pages 42-43, road-traffic use case. — The critical-infrastructure discussion expressly covers road traffic.
• Sector tags: Education · European Commission · Section IV.3.3, printed pages 48-59. — The body expressly covers education and vocational-training use cases.
• Sector tags: Employment and labour · European Commission · Section IV.3.4, printed pages 60-77. — The body expressly covers employment and worker-management use cases.
• Sector tags: Public administration · European Commission · Section IV.3.5.2, printed pages 79-84, public-assistance benefits and services. — The body expressly covers public-authority delivery of essential assistance.
• Sector tags: Financial services · European Commission · Sections IV.3.5.3-IV.3.5.5, printed pages 85-93, creditworthiness and insurance. — The body expressly covers credit and insurance decisions.
• Sector tags: Health · European Commission · Sections IV.3.5.4 and IV.3.5.6, printed pages 89-91 and 94-98, health insurance and emergency services. — The body expressly covers health-insurance and emergency-service use cases.
• Sector tags: Law enforcement · European Commission · Section IV.3.6, printed pages 99-115. — The body expressly covers law-enforcement use cases.
• Sector tags: Migration asylum and border management · European Commission · Section IV.3.7, printed pages 116-129. — The body expressly covers migration, asylum and border-management use cases.
• Sector tags: Justice · European Commission · Section IV.3.8, administration of justice and democratic processes. — The body expressly covers administration-of-justice use cases.
• 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 Annex III systems download as a section of the draft consultation guidelines. — The Commission issued the section 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.

Production provenance

Provenance tags

• Authored by an EU institution
• Official consultation material
• Officially published

Named bibliographic authors

None recorded after review

Institutions and roles

• European Commission · Author · role evidence · PDF page 1 cover carries the European Commission masthead for this Annex III systems section.

Official sources and identifiers

• Official source · Publisher/host: European Commission
• Official source · Publisher/host: European Commission

Parent or principal record

• Parent or principal record: Draft high-risk classification guidelines — Complete consultation work

  Part of · Official relationship · Verified

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. Subsequent file-level review by AI-assisted reviewer at 2026-09-05T08:20:53Z: retrieved official PDF 128561 and recorded its real SHA-256 and local file-write-completion timestamp (an operational retrieval-time proxy). Cover and first contents page reviewed, not all 148 pages. Shared cover/title and detailed Article 6(2)/Annex III contents support section identity, not a separately verified combined full work. 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, audited body-supported sector locators 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

• Draft Annex III high-risk classification guidelines · Related to · Draft high-risk classification guidelines — General principles

  Analytical relationship · Verified

  Research assessment rationale: The Commission landing page presents this file and the General-principles file as sibling sections of one draft guideline, not versions or annexes of the General-principles file; related_to records association only and does not establish parent readiness.

  Evidence source: European Commission

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 1547742-byte response is a 148-page PDF, confirmed by PDF signature, Poppler and pypdf despite the malformed HTTP Content-Type value '/'. SHA-256: b1df0ffb30310e126c7e060e03c9b5aab97c0a2ab61a2f3e3e00ede3655e2792. 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 contents page reviewed, not all 148 pages. Shared cover/title and detailed Article 6(2)/Annex III contents support section identity, not a separately verified combined full work. 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.