14. Governing AI development
AI development is governed when every decision in the build, from the use case to the release, leaves a record that a gate reads, so the pipeline compiles the technical file instead of a team writing it afterwards.
New to the field? Start with the definition of AI governance.
Key terms in this chapter
The build as a chain of gates
Most governance failures in an AI system are decided before it serves its first request. The use case was never written down, so nobody can say what the system is for. The training set was scraped under terms nobody checked. The test set leaked into training. The release went out because the date was fixed. Each of these is a development decision, and each leaves behind either a record or a gap.
This chapter covers the provider side of the lifecycle: the organisation that designs, trains, tests and releases an AI system or model. Chapter 15 covers deployment and use. The split follows the EU AI Act’s duty holders (see the regulatory map): most of what follows binds the provider, and a deployer that builds on a procured model inherits a thinner version of it through the Vendor / Model Due-Diligence Gate.
The reference texts agree on the stages and say little about the mechanism. ISO/IEC 5338:2023 defines AI system life cycle processes1; ISO/IEC 42001 groups the controls under Annex A.6 (life cycle) and A.7 (data)2; the NIST AI RMF puts context in Map and testing in Measure3; the EU AI Act’s quality management system asks for design control, design verification and “examination, test and validation procedures to be carried out before, during and after the development”4. The engineering reading: every stage ends in a gate, every gate reads a structured record, and every record lands in the evidence store keyed to the registry id, the data path of one system through the five layers.
Layer numbers in the tables of this chapter follow chapter 04: 1 Govern-as-Code · 2 Inventory & Transparency · 3 Evals & Red Teaming as Evidence · 4 Runtime Controls & Observability · 5 Assurance & Continuous Compliance.
| Stage | Governance question | Record | Gate | Layer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Use case | Is this the right problem, and is AI the right tool? | Use-case record | Intake approval | 1 · 2 |
| Design review | Do the requirements, architecture and misuse analysis hold up? | Design record and decision log | Design review sign-off | 1 · 2 |
| Data | May we use this data, and is it fit for the purpose? | Dataset admission record, datasheet, lineage | Dataset admission gate | 1 · 2 · 3 |
| Testing | Does the system meet thresholds fixed before the tests ran? | Test plan, eval results, test report | Eval gate | 3 |
| Release | Is it ready, and is the conformity route complete? | Go/no-go record, declaration, registration | Release gate | 1 · 5 |
| Technical file | Can an authority reconstruct all of the above? | Annex IV file, cards, AIBOM | Documentation build | 2 · 5 |
This is not MLOps, which moves the model through the same stages, and it is not model validation in the banking sense, which challenges the model at points in time (the disambiguation cluster draws both lines). It is the governance record those two activities produce, made machine-readable and given the power to block. The organisation-level rules each gate enforces are set out in chapter 12 (what policy requires at each stage), and the templates page has schemas and filled examples for the use-case record, design review, dataset admission, test plan and report, and release gate.
The use-case record
The use-case record is the first artefact and the one most often missing. It is written at intake, stored as fields on the registry entry, and read by every later gate. The EU AI Act anchors it: the intended purpose is “the use for which an AI system is intended by the provider, including the specific context and conditions of use”5, and most high-risk duties are measured against it. The NIST AI RMF asks for the same thing in engineering terms: intended purposes, prospective settings and the types of users are “understood and documented” (MAP 1.1), and organisational risk tolerances are “determined and documented” (MAP 1.5)3.
| Field | What it records | Read later by |
|---|---|---|
| Business context | The objective, the sponsor, the decision the system informs | Design review, go/no-go |
| Intended purpose | Task, context and conditions of use | Classification, tests, instructions for use |
| Out-of-scope uses | Uses the provider rules out, stated explicitly | Misuse analysis, instructions for use, runtime policy |
| Users and affected persons | Who operates it; who is subject to its outputs, including vulnerable groups | Impact assessments, bias tests |
| Decision authority | Advisory, human-approved or autonomous; who can overrule it | Oversight design, human-in-the-loop gate |
| Operating environment | Where it runs, input sources, languages, jurisdictions | Representativeness checks, test plan |
| Success metrics | The business metric, the model metric and the link between them | Test plan, monitoring |
| Error appetite | The cost of a false positive against a false negative; tolerated rates | Thresholds |
| Expected lifetime | Review date and retirement criteria | Maintenance, retention |
| Data availability | Whether lawful, sufficient data exists | Feasibility, dataset admission |
Is AI the right tool?
The first gate question is whether to build at all. Google’s engineering guidance opens with the rule “Don’t be afraid to launch a product without machine learning”6, and the governance version is sharper: if a rule, a lookup or a human workflow meets the success metric, a model adds risk without adding value. Record the non-ML baseline in the use-case record and require the design review to beat it by a stated margin. The baseline also gives testing its first comparison: a model that does not outperform the rule it replaces has not earned a place in production.
Error appetite: false positives versus false negatives
Every classifier trades one error for another, and the trade is a business and rights decision, not a modelling one. A fraud model that flags too much freezes legitimate customers; one that flags too little lets fraud through. Write the appetite down before training, in the currency of harm: what a missed case costs, what a false alarm costs, and which error, for which group, is capped regardless of cost. Threshold selection then becomes arithmetic against stated costs, and moving the threshold becomes a change to the record with an approver, not a tuning decision inside a notebook. Per-group error rates and the fairness trade-offs they force are treated in chapter 16.
Function creep
A model built for one purpose drifts into others because its scores are available and cheap. The US banking agencies’ revised model-risk guidance puts it plainly: “Using a model beyond its intended purpose introduces additional uncertainty and risk”7. Under the EU AI Act the drift has legal consequences. A value-chain actor that modifies the intended purpose of a system so that it becomes high-risk is treated as its provider (Art. 25(1)(c))8, and a change not foreseen in the initial conformity assessment that affects compliance is a substantial modification (Art. 3(23))5. The engineering control is to make the intended purpose and the out-of-scope list fields that a policy reads. A new consumer of the model’s API declares its use at registration; a declared use outside the record fails admission and reopens classification and the impact assessments.
{
"id": "uc-credit-limit-07",
"registry_id": "clm-07",
"intended_purpose": "Recommend a credit-limit band for existing retail customers; a credit officer approves.",
"out_of_scope": ["new-customer onboarding", "collections prioritisation", "employment decisions"],
"affected_persons": ["retail customers", "guarantors"],
"decision_authority": "advisory; officer approval required above band 3",
"success_metric": { "business": "bad-debt rate", "model": "AUC >= 0.78 on frozen holdout" },
"error_appetite": { "false_negative": "loss amount", "false_positive": "declined uplift",
"max_fnr_gap_between_groups": 0.03 },
"non_ml_baseline": "scorecard-v5",
"classification": { "eu_ai_act": "high-risk, Annex III 5(b)", "gdpr_dpia": true, "fria": true },
"owner": "team-credit-decisioning",
"review_by": "2027-03-31"
}
Design review
The design review is the gate between an approved use case and spending compute. It reads the use-case record and produces a design record: requirements, architecture and model choice with their rationale, the misuse analysis, the oversight design and the controls built in. Annex IV point 2(b) will ask a high-risk provider for the key design choices, their rationale and assumptions, and the trade-offs made9; written at the time, that costs minutes, and reconstructed a year later, it costs a project.
Requirements with traceability
Requirements come in three families. Functional requirements say what the system does. Non-functional requirements set floors for accuracy, latency, fairness, explainability, privacy, robustness and cost. Regulatory requirements are the obligations the classification triggers, such as event logging or designed-in oversight for a high-risk system. The NIST AI RMF asks that system requirements are “elicited from and understood by relevant AI actors” (MAP 1.6)3.
Traceability is the engineering part. Each requirement gets an id, each id maps to at least one test,
and each test emits an evidence record naming the requirement. The trace then becomes a join, not a
spreadsheet: REQ-FAIR-02 (false-negative-rate gap between age bands at most 0.03) resolves to the
suite fnr-gap-by-age.v2, to its last result, and to the release that shipped on it. A requirement
with no test is a wish; a test with no requirement is noise in the gate.
Architecture and model-selection trade-offs
Model choice is a governance decision because it fixes what can later be tested, explained and evidenced. Record each choice as a short decision record (context, options, decision, consequences, date, approver) in the same repository as the code.
| Choice | Options | Governance consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Interpretable or complex | Scorecard, sparse or additive model, small tree; or gradient boosting, deep network, LLM | An interpretable model is its own explanation; a complex one needs post-hoc explanation that can diverge from the model. Rudin argues that high-stakes decisions should use interpretable models instead of explaining black boxes after the fact 10 |
| Open-weight or proprietary | Self-hosted weights; or a vendor API | Weights can be tested, pinned and hosted in region; an API can change behind you, and its evidence is collected, not produced (procured AI) |
| Train, fine-tune or prompt | Own model; fine-tuned foundation model; prompting and retrieval | Each step up adds training-data duties; a large enough modification of a general-purpose model can make you its provider 11 |
| Retrieval or fine-tuning for knowledge | RAG corpus; knowledge in weights | A corpus can be versioned, filtered and deleted from; knowledge in weights cannot be removed without retraining |
| Hosting | Managed service; own infrastructure | Data residency, log ownership and retention control |
| Cost and sustainability | Model size, training runs, inference volume | Annex IV asks for the computational resources used to develop, train, test and validate9; Annex XI asks GPAI providers for known or estimated energy consumption 12 |
Reasonably foreseeable misuse
Reasonably foreseeable misuse is “the use of an AI system in a way that is not in accordance with its intended purpose, but which may result from reasonably foreseeable human behaviour or interaction with other systems”5. It is not the same thing as an attack. An attacker is modelled by the red team in layer 03; foreseeable misuse is what ordinary users and adjacent systems will do with the output anyway: a triage score read as a diagnosis, a CV ranking used to reject without review, a summariser pointed at a language it was never tested on.
The EU AI Act makes the analysis a design input twice. The risk management system must estimate and evaluate the risks that emerge under conditions of reasonably foreseeable misuse (Art. 9(2)(b))13, and the instructions for use must disclose known or foreseeable circumstances, including such misuse, that may lead to risks to health, safety or fundamental rights (Art. 13(3)(b)(iii))14. Keep a misuse register in the design record: scenario, who would do it, likelihood, harm, and the response. Each entry must land in at least one of three places: a test in the eval suite, a runtime policy that blocks or flags it, or a warning in the instructions for use. An entry that lands nowhere is an accepted risk and needs a named acceptor (chapter 13 covers who may accept).
Oversight and controls designed in
The decision-authority field of the use-case record sets the oversight model. The EU’s High-Level Expert Group names three approaches: human-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop and human-in-command15. The design review picks one per class of decision and designs it against automation bias and oversight that degrades under load, as set out in designing human oversight and the Human-in-the-loop Gate pattern. The same review fixes the controls that are cheap now and expensive to retrofit: event logging, a rollback path, a shadow mode, and a Kill Switch / Circuit Breaker for anything that acts.
The review is a gate with named reviewers: an engineering lead, the AI governance engineer, security, privacy, a domain expert and, where the affected persons are outside the organisation, someone who can speak for them. Its output is a signed design record with open conditions, not minutes.
Data for training and testing
Data governance across the stack sets the rule that every dataset carries a lawful basis, a provenance, a retention limit and a set of rights. This section is the development-time procedure that enforces it: a dataset admission gate. A training job may read only datasets whose admission record is complete and signed by the data owner, and the check is policy-as-code in the pipeline, not a reminder in a wiki.
The right to use the data
Admission starts with rights, because a quality problem can be fixed and a rights problem often cannot. Per dataset, the record answers five questions.
- Lawful basis and purpose. For personal data, which GDPR basis applies to training, and whether training is compatible with the purpose of the original collection. Purpose limitation (Art. 5(1)(b)) and the compatibility factors of Art. 6(4) decide whether data collected to serve customers may train a model about them16. Consent to a service is not consent to train.
- Special categories. After the Digital Omnibus, the narrow basis to process special-category data for bias detection sits in a new Art. 4a rather than the old Art. 10(5), conditioned on safeguards and deletion 17 (see the regulatory map).
- Models as personal data. The EDPB’s Opinion 28/2024 (December 2024) holds that a model trained on personal data is anonymous only if it is very unlikely both to identify the people whose data trained it and to let anyone extract that data through queries; it sets a three-step test for legitimate interest and warns that unlawful processing in development can affect the lawfulness of deployment18. Chapter 19 takes this further.
- Scraped and third-party content. The EU’s commercial text-and-data-mining exception applies only where rightholders have not reserved their rights “in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means” for content made publicly available online (DSM Directive Art. 4(3))19, and a GPAI provider must keep a copyright policy that identifies and complies with such reservations (AI Act Art. 53(1)(c))20. Record the crawl date, the reservation check and its result per source.
- Licences and warranties. Whether the dataset licence permits training, commercial use and distribution of derived models, and what the supplier warrants about lawful collection. The licence goes into the AIBOM so a licence change surfaces in the next build.
Quality, quantity, representativeness and fitness for purpose
For high-risk systems, Art. 10 turns data quality into law. Training, validation and testing sets need governance practices covering, among others, collection and origin, preparation, the assumptions about what the data measures, availability and suitability, bias examination and mitigation, and data gaps (Art. 10(2)); they must be “relevant, sufficiently representative, and to the best extent possible, free of errors and complete” (Art. 10(3)) and reflect the setting of use (Art. 10(4))21. The ISO/IEC 5259 series supplies the vocabulary, the measures and the process and governance frameworks22.
| Dimension | Question | Test that evidences it |
|---|---|---|
| Label accuracy | Are the labels right? | Audit of a labelled sample; inter-annotator agreement |
| Completeness | Are fields, segments or periods missing? | Null rates per field and per segment |
| Consistency | Is the same fact recorded the same way? | Schema and constraint checks |
| Timeliness | Is the data current for the operating environment? | Date range against the use-case record |
| Quantity | Are there enough examples per class and per group? | Cell counts against the minimum in the test plan |
| Representativeness | Does the population match the deployment population? | Distribution comparison against a reference |
| Fitness for purpose | Does the data measure what the use case needs, or a proxy? | Proxy analysis; assumption register (Art. 10(2)(d)) |
| Integrity | Has it changed since admission? | Content hashes; signed snapshots |
Quantity is not representativeness. A large dataset drawn from the wrong population is precisely wrong, and more of it does not cure the bias; it only narrows the confidence interval around the wrong answer. The tools catalogue lists data-validation tools as illustrative examples, not endorsements.
Owners, stewards and the admission gate
The data owner is accountable for a dataset: its permitted uses, its risk acceptance and the signature on its admission record. The data steward operates it: quality checks, metadata, access and deletion. Separating the two keeps the person who wants the data used from being the only person who decides it may be. Where many teams share data, a small data review board settles contested admissions and sets the minimum admission checklist; the checklist itself lives as code so that a missing field fails the pipeline.
Provenance versus lineage
Text description
Provenance is where a dataset came from and on what terms. Lineage is how the data moved and changed through pipelines, recorded as lineage events about datasets, jobs and runs. Lineage runs both ways: backward lineage answers "what fed this model?", forward lineage answers "which models used this dataset?", and the second question is the one an erasure request or a licence withdrawal asks. Granularity follows where rights attach: dataset-level provenance is the default, record-level provenance is needed where rights attach to records (personal data, per-source licences, opt-outs), and feature-level lineage is needed for sensitive derived features that can act as proxies. The human-readable companion is a datasheet.
The two words are used interchangeably and should not be. Provenance is where a dataset came from and on what terms. W3C PROV defines it as “information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or thing, which can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness”, and its data model (PROV-DM, a W3C Recommendation since 30 Apr 2013) expresses it as entities, activities and agents23. Lineage is how the data moved and changed through pipelines. OpenLineage provides an open standard for emitting lineage events about datasets, jobs and runs, with extensible facets24. Lineage runs both ways: backward lineage answers “what fed this model?”, forward lineage answers “which models used this dataset?”, and the second question is the one an erasure request or a licence withdrawal asks.
Choose granularity by where rights attach. Dataset-level provenance is the default. Record-level provenance is needed where rights attach to records (personal data, per-source licences, opt-outs). Feature-level lineage is needed for sensitive derived features that can act as proxies. The human-readable companion is a datasheet: Gebru and colleagues proposed that every dataset carry one covering its motivation, composition, collection, preprocessing, uses, distribution and maintenance25. The tools catalogue lists versioning and lineage tools as illustrative examples, not endorsements.
Synthetic data, augmentation and privacy-enhancing technologies
Synthetic data inherits the properties of its generator: its biases, its gaps and, where the generator memorised, its source records. Treat a synthetic set as a dataset with its own admission record naming the generator, the seed data and the privacy method. Differential privacy is the privacy-enhancing technology with a measurable guarantee, and NIST SP 800-226 (March 2025) explains how to evaluate a differential-privacy claim and the “privacy hazards” that arise when the mathematics meets an implementation26. Augmentation and resampling change class balance and, applied before the train and test split, leak information into the test set and inflate scores.
Synthetic data is also a disclosure item. California’s AB 2013, operative since 1 Jan 2026, requires developers of generative AI systems made available to Californians to post training-data documentation that states, among other items, whether synthetic data generation was used27; the EU template for the GPAI training-content summary lists synthetic data among the data sources to describe28.
{
"dataset_id": "ds-claims-2019-2025@v4",
"owner": "head-of-claims-data",
"steward": "data-platform-claims",
"sources": [{ "name": "claims-core", "period": "2019-01/2025-12",
"basis": "GDPR Art. 6(1)(f); compatibility assessment CA-2026-014", "licence": "internal" }],
"tdm_reservation_check": "not applicable (internal data)",
"special_category": { "present": false },
"provenance": "prov:wasDerivedFrom claims-core@2026-01-15",
"lineage_run": "openlineage:claims-features/run-8812",
"quality": { "null_rate_max": 0.02, "label_agreement": 0.91, "min_n_per_group": 400 },
"permitted_uses": ["uc-fraud-triage-03"],
"retention_until": "2032-12-31",
"admitted": true,
"admitted_by": "head-of-claims-data",
"timestamp": "2026-09-20T10:12:00Z"
}
Testing and validation
A test plan before the first run
The EU AI Act requires high-risk systems to be tested “throughout the development process, and, in any event, prior to their being placed on the market”, against “prior defined metrics and probabilistic thresholds that are appropriate to the intended purpose” (Art. 9(8))13. The NIST AI RMF asks that test sets, metrics and tools are documented (MEASURE 2.1) and that the system is shown to be valid and reliable, with the limits of generalisation documented (MEASURE 2.5)3. The operative words are prior defined. Freeze the test plan in the repository before evaluation starts: metrics, thresholds with their link to the error appetite, datasets, subgroups, sample sizes and the number of repeated runs. A change to the plan after results are known is a diff with an approver. That single rule prevents metric shopping, the habit of choosing the metric that passes after seeing all of them.
The test-type matrix
ISO/IEC TR 29119-11 gives guidelines for testing AI-based systems29, and the ISO/IEC 24029 series covers the assessment of neural-network robustness30. The matrix below is the working version: one row per test type, one column per system family, and the evidence each run leaves. Tail latency (the 95th or 99th percentile) belongs in it because a mean hides the slow requests that users and timeouts actually meet.
| Test type | Classic ML | LLM or agent system | Evidence record |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unit | Feature transforms, data validators, model-wrapper input and output contracts | Prompt templates, tool schemas, output parsers | CI test run |
| Integration | Pipeline end to end on a fixture dataset | Orchestration, retrieval and tool calls against sandboxes | Integration report |
| Validation | Holdout, k-fold cross-validation, external validation on another site or period | Held-out task suites, golden sets, human-rated samples | Eval result with interval |
| Performance | Throughput, p95 and p99 latency, memory | Time to first token, p99 latency, tokens and cost per task | Load-test report |
| Robustness and out-of-distribution | Noise, perturbation, covariate shift, out-of-distribution sets | Paraphrase, typos, language and format shift, long context | Robustness eval |
| Stress and edge cases | Extreme values, rare classes, missing inputs | Oversized inputs, tool failures, timeouts, loops | Stress report |
| Security and adversarial | Evasion, poisoning, model extraction, membership inference | Prompt injection, jailbreak, tool misuse, data exfiltration | Red-team findings |
| Bias and fairness | Error and selection rates by group | Quality and refusal rates by group, language and dialect | Subgroup eval |
| Interpretability | Global feature importance, local explanations, reason-code stability | Citation faithfulness, rationale consistency | Explanation eval |
| Scenario | End-to-end cases from the use-case record and misuse register | Multi-step tasks and agent trajectories | Scenario report |
| Human-in-the-loop | Reviewer accuracy with and without the model; override rate | Approval quality under load; automation-bias probes | Oversight test |
| Regression | Score deltas against the last release | Score deltas against the last model or prompt version | Eval gate verdict |
Each row is a suite behind the Eval Gate in CI; the security row is the Adversarial Red-Team Suite. Fairness metrics are defined in chapter 16, which also covers bias and interpretability testing of the explanations themselves.
Statistical validity of evals
An eval gate is only as good as the statistics under its threshold, and most gates have none (the limits of the eval gate set out the other limits). Miller’s treatment of language-model evaluations frames eval questions as a sample from an unseen super-population and gives the formulas for standard errors, for comparing two models and for planning sample sizes31. Four consequences for the gate follow.
- Report an interval, not a point. A pass rate of 0.96 on 200 cases has a standard error of √(0.96 × 0.04 / 200) ≈ 0.014, so its 95% interval is about 0.933 to 0.987 (±1.96 standard errors). A 0.95 threshold sits inside it, and the gate cannot tell a pass from a fail. On 2,000 cases the interval narrows to about 0.951 to 0.969. Size the suite from the threshold, not from the time available.
- Zero failures is not zero risk. If none of n independent cases fails, the failure rate that would produce that result 5% of the time satisfies (1 − p)^n = 0.05, so p ≈ −ln(0.05)/n ≈ 3/n. Three hundred clean cases bound the failure rate at about 1% with 95% confidence.
- Repeat non-deterministic runs. Sampling temperature, batching and tool latency make one run a sample of one. Run each suite several times, report the mean and the spread, pin seeds and versions where the stack allows, and compare models on the same questions (a paired design) to cut noise31.
- Distrust the judge and the benchmark. LLM judges show position, verbosity and self-enhancement biases, even where strong judges reach over 80% agreement with human preferences32. Calibrate a judge against a human-labelled sample, randomise answer order, prefer a judge from a different model family than the one under test, and version the judge prompt with the suite. Test items seen in training inflate scores; contamination can be demonstrated even for black-box models33. Keep private held-out sets, rotate items and record when each item was written against the model’s data cut-off.
Independent validation and model risk management
Banking has run independent model validation for years, and AI governance engineering borrows its best idea: effective challenge. In the US, SR 11-7 (2011) was replaced on 17 Apr 2026 by SR 26-2, joint guidance from the Federal Reserve, the OCC and the FDIC. It keeps effective challenge as critical analysis by objective experts with the expertise, “sufficient independence to maintain objectivity”, and the standing to effect change, and it keeps the three components of validation: conceptual soundness, ongoing monitoring and outcomes analysis7. It also draws a line the engineer must notice: generative and agentic AI models “are not within the scope of this guidance”, while its principles apply to traditional models and “non-generative, non-agentic AI models”7. In the UK, the PRA’s SS1/23 applies to banks, building societies and PRA-designated investment firms with internal-model approval, makes independent model validation one of its five principles and addresses AI and machine-learning techniques34.
AI governance engineering takes from this tradition the validator’s independence, the documented challenge and tiering by materiality. It adds validation as a re-runnable suite with evidence records rather than a PDF, and coverage for the generative and agentic systems SR 26-2 leaves out. The validator works from a separate repository with read access to model and data, files findings as issues with owners and deadlines, and signs the release gate for the high tiers.
Reproducibility and linked versioning
A result nobody can reproduce is not evidence. The training record captures the code commit, the hashes of the admitted data snapshots, the configuration and hyperparameters, the seeds, the environment (container digest, library versions, hardware), the compute used, labelling quality (inter-annotator agreement) and the owner. The record links in both directions: model version to training record to eval results to release tag to the risk approvals that let it ship.
The model artefact itself needs integrity. Sign it: the OpenSSF model-signing tooling signs a statement listing each model file and its digest, through Sigstore or conventional keys, and verification recomputes the hashes35. Refuse to load serialised formats that execute code from untrusted sources; the Python documentation is blunt that “The pickle module is not secure”36. Both checks belong in the build next to the AIBOM. The tools catalogue lists signing and artefact-scanning tools as illustrative examples, not endorsements.
What goes wrong in training and testing
| Problem | How it shows | How to detect it | Gate response |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data leakage | Test score too good; collapses in production | Split by entity and time; audit features for post-outcome fields | Block; re-split and retrain |
| Overfitting | Training score far above validation | Learning curves; cross-validation variance | Block; regularise or add data |
| Underfitting | Both scores low, near the baseline | Comparison with the non-ML baseline | Block; revisit the design |
| Label noise | Accuracy ceiling; inconsistent labels | Inter-annotator agreement; relabelled sample | Reopen dataset admission |
| Class imbalance | High accuracy, poor minority recall | Per-class metrics, not accuracy alone | Resample or reweight; re-test |
| Poor calibration | Scores do not match observed rates | Reliability diagram; calibration error | Recalibrate before thresholds are set |
| Subgroup coverage gap | Wide intervals or no data for a group | Cell counts against the test plan | Block for high-risk; collect data |
| Environment mismatch | Passes offline, fails online | Shadow run on live inputs | Hold at shadow |
| Test contamination | Public-benchmark score above private-set score | Private and public gap; contamination tests | Drop contaminated items |
| Irreproducible result | A rerun disagrees | Fixed-seed reruns | Block until reproducible |
| Use beyond consent scope | Dataset used outside its permitted uses | Lineage joined to admission records | Block; legal review |
Every finding becomes an issue with an owner, a severity and a deadline. A finding that ships unfixed is an accepted risk with a named acceptor, recorded in the risk register that chapter 13 describes, and becomes a regression test so it cannot return silently.
Release readiness and conformity
The go/no-go gate
Release is a governance milestone, not an engineering handover. The release gate reads the records the earlier gates produced and refuses to open while any is missing or stale: a current use-case record; a signed design record; admitted datasets; a test report against the frozen plan; open issues below the agreed severity or accepted by a named acceptor; completed impact assessments; regenerated cards and instructions for use; monitoring configured (see chapter 15); a tested rollback; trained operators. The reviewers are named in advance: product owner, engineering, the AI governance engineer, security, privacy and, for the high tiers, legal and the independent validator. The output is a signed go/no-go record with its conditions, filed against the registry entry. The deployer runs its own go-live review on top of it (chapter 15). Release in stages, each with exit criteria from the test plan: shadow (the system runs on live inputs and its outputs are logged, not used), canary (a small share of traffic), a limited pilot, then general availability. In the EU, research, testing and development before placing on the market sit outside the AI Act, except testing in real-world conditions37; that testing is governed by Art. 60, which after the Omnibus covers Annex III systems and Annex I Section A products, with a new Art. 60a letting member states permit it for Section B products17.
EU AI Act conformity, in order
For high-risk systems the release gate carries a legal sequence. After the Digital Omnibus, the high-risk duties apply to Annex III systems from 2 Dec 2027 and to Annex I products from 2 Aug 202838.
| Step | Article | Artefact | Produced by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Quality management system in place | Art. 17 | QMS procedures, versioned | Provider |
| 2. Technical documentation drawn up | Art. 11, Annex IV | The technical file | Pipeline and named authors |
| 3. Conformity assessment | Art. 43, Annex VI or VII | Internal-control record, or notified-body certificate | Provider, or notified body |
| 4. EU declaration of conformity | Art. 47, Annex V | Signed declaration | Provider |
| 5. CE marking | Art. 48 | Physical or digital CE marking, with the notified-body number where one was involved | Provider |
| 6. Registration | Art. 49, Art. 71 | EU database entry | Provider |
| 7. Placing on the market and monitoring | Art. 72 | Post-market monitoring plan in operation | Provider |
Annex VI or Annex VII. Annex III points 2 to 8 follow internal control under Annex VI, with no notified body39. Under Annex VI the provider verifies that its quality management system complies with Art. 17, examines the technical documentation against the requirements, and verifies that the design and development process and the post-market monitoring are consistent with that documentation39. Annex III point 1 (biometrics) may use Annex VI or Annex VII only where the provider has applied harmonised standards or common specifications; otherwise it must follow Annex VII, in which a notified body assesses the quality management system and the technical documentation, with full access to the training, validation and testing datasets, issues a certificate and must be told of changes39. No harmonised standard had been cited in the Official Journal at the last check this book records (2026-09-19; see what is not harmonised yet)40; while that holds, a biometric provider planning today should plan for a notified body. Annex I products go through their sectoral conformity procedure, and the Omnibus lets bodies notified under that legislation assess the AI requirements if they apply for designation by 28 Jan 202817.
Declaration, marking and registration. The EU declaration of conformity follows Annex V and is kept for 10 years; the CE marking is affixed visibly, legibly and indelibly, or digitally for systems provided digitally41. Before placing on the market, the provider registers Annex III systems in the EU database, except point 2 (critical infrastructure), which is registered at national level; systems the provider has judged not high-risk under Art. 6(3) are also registered; and law enforcement, migration, asylum and border systems go into a non-public section42. After the Omnibus, the Art. 6(3) registration asks for less data, and SMEs and small mid-caps may provide the technical documentation in a simplified form the Commission establishes17. The engineering move is to generate the database payload from the registry entry, so that the registration and the Agent Registry cannot drift apart.
Substantial modification
A substantial modification is a change after placing on the market “which is not foreseen or planned in the initial conformity assessment carried out by the provider and as a result of which the compliance of the AI system with the requirements set out in Chapter III, Section 2 is affected or results in a modification to the intended purpose for which the AI system has been assessed”5. It triggers a new conformity assessment (Art. 43(4)); for systems that keep learning after release, changes the provider pre-determined at the initial assessment and described in the technical documentation are not substantial modifications39, which is why Annex IV point 2(f) asks for those pre-determined changes and the technical solutions that keep the system compliant as it changes9.
Write the pre-determined envelope as code: permitted data sources, retraining cadence, metric floors and threshold ranges. Then classify every change to model, data, prompts, tools or thresholds on merge: inside the envelope (re-run the gates), outside it but compliance unaffected (re-run the gates and record the reasoning), or a potential substantial modification (stop, legal review, reassessment). A retrained model is a new release. It passes the same gates, gets a new version in the registry and regenerates its cards; it does not inherit its predecessor’s verdicts. For agents, chapter 23 puts prompt and system-prompt changes under change control.
The technical file
Annex IV, element by element
Art. 11 requires the technical documentation of a high-risk system to be drawn up before it is placed on the market and kept up to date, with at least the contents of Annex IV9. Most of Annex IV is already produced by a governed pipeline; the rest is judgement that only a person can supply. The table splits it.
| Annex IV item | What it asks for | Pipeline source | What a person must still write |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1(a) | Intended purpose, provider, version | Use-case record; registry entry | The intended-purpose statement itself |
| 1(b) | Interaction with other hardware, software and AI systems | AIBOM; architecture diagram | Integration assumptions |
| 1(c) | Software and firmware versions; update requirements | AIBOM; lockfiles | None beyond review |
| 1(d) | Forms in which it is placed on the market | Release manifest | Distribution description |
| 1(e) | Hardware it runs on | Deployment manifests | None beyond review |
| 1(f) | Photographs, where it is a product component | Not applicable to most software | Product documentation |
| 1(g) | The user interface given to the deployer | UI captures from integration tests | Description of use |
| 1(h) | Instructions for use | Generated from the use-case record, model card and misuse register | Limitations and oversight guidance, in plain language |
| 2(a) | Development methods, pre-trained systems, third-party tools | Training record; AIBOM | Why these were chosen |
| 2(b) | Design specifications, key choices, rationale, trade-offs | Design record; decision log | The rationale and assumptions |
| 2(c) | Architecture and computational resources | Training record (compute); architecture diagram | None beyond review |
| 2(d) | Datasheets: training data, provenance, selection, labelling, cleaning | Admission records; datasheets; lineage | The assumptions about what the data measures |
| 2(e) | Assessment of the human-oversight measures | Oversight design; human-in-the-loop test results | The assessment |
| 2(f) | Pre-determined changes and how compliance is kept | Envelope-as-code | The justification of the envelope |
| 2(g) | Validation and testing: data, metrics, discriminatory impacts, dated and signed test reports | Test plan; eval results; test reports | Signatures of the responsible persons |
| 2(h) | Cybersecurity measures | Security test results; threat model; signing records | Residual security risk |
| 3 | Capabilities, limitations, accuracy for specific groups, foreseeable unintended outcomes | Model card; subgroup evals; misuse register | Interpretation of the limits |
| 4 | Why the performance metrics are appropriate | Test plan | The argument |
| 5 | The risk management system | Risk register | Residual-risk judgement |
| 6 | Relevant changes over the lifecycle | Version control; registry history | None beyond review |
| 7 | Harmonised standards applied, or the other solutions used | Crosswalk file | The solutions description (no OJ-cited standard at the last check) |
| 8 | A copy of the EU declaration of conformity | Generated from the evidence | Signature |
| 9 | The post-market monitoring system, with its plan | Monitoring configuration | The plan’s triggers and responses |
The post-market monitoring plan is part of this file, not a separate document (Art. 72(3))43. Build the file the way code is built: a documentation job assembles it on every release candidate, fails when a generated row is stale or a written row is older than the model version it describes, and emits the result as Machine-Readable Evidence (OSCAL) alongside a human-readable rendering.
Model cards, system cards and datasheets
The documents overlap and answer different questions for different readers.
| Document | Describes | Main reader | Filled from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model card | One trained model: intended use, evaluation across groups and conditions, limitations 44 | Integrators, deployers, auditors | Eval results; AIBOM |
| System card | The deployed system: models, prompts, retrieval, tools, guardrails and oversight | Deployers, authorities, the public | Registry; guardrail configuration; red-team results |
| Datasheet (data card) | One dataset: motivation, composition, collection, preprocessing, uses, distribution, maintenance 25 | Data owners, model builders, auditors | Admission record; lineage |
| Instructions for use | What a deployer needs to use a high-risk system correctly (Art. 13) 14 | Deployers | Use-case record; model card; misuse register |
| Technical file | All of the above plus risk management, standards, declaration and monitoring plan 9 | Authorities; notified bodies | Everything above |
Most risk sits in the system, not the raw model (chapter 01), so a model card alone under-describes anything with tools or retrieval. Generate every card from the same records, as in the Model Card as Control Evidence pattern, so the card an auditor reads is the card production produced.
The GPAI provider side
A provider of a general-purpose AI model has its own documentation set under Art. 53: technical documentation per Annex XI for the AI Office and national authorities, information per Annex XII for downstream providers, a copyright policy, and a public summary of training content on the AI Office template20. Annex XI covers architecture and parameter count, training methodology, the training data (type, provenance, curation, methods to detect unsuitable sources and biases), the compute and the known or estimated energy consumption; for models with systemic risk it adds evaluation strategies, adversarial testing and system architecture12.
Who is a GPAI provider is partly a compute question. The Commission’s indicative criterion is training compute above 10^23 FLOP with the ability to generate language, text-to-image or text-to-video; a downstream modifier is indicatively the provider of the modified model when its modification compute exceeds a third of the original’s; and the systemic-risk presumption starts at 10^25 FLOP, with notification to the Commission within two weeks11. Put these thresholds in the design review’s model-selection record, because a fine-tuning plan can change the organisation’s legal role.
Three Commission instruments turn the duties into artefacts. The GPAI Code of Practice (10 Jul 2025, voluntary) includes, in its Transparency chapter, a Model Documentation Form 45 that gathers the Annex XI and XII information in one place and marks each item for downstream providers, the AI Office or national authorities; the Code asks that each version’s documentation be kept for 10 years46. The training-content summary uses a template that is mandatory under Art. 53(1)(d): it covers general information, data sources (including public, private, scraped, user and synthetic data) and data processing, lists the top 10% of scraped domains (5% or 1,000, whichever is lower, for SMEs), is refreshed every six months or sooner after a material update, and must exist by 2 Aug 2027 for models placed on the market before 2 Aug 202528. For systemic-risk models, the Code’s Safety and Security chapter adds a Safety and Security Model Report, created before the model is placed on the market and kept up to date (Commitment 7)46. Engineering implication: the Model Documentation Form is generated from the training record and the AIBOM, and the training-content summary, including its domain list, is a query over the admission records and the crawl logs, not a drafting exercise.
Open-weight release decisions
Release is a gradient, not a switch. Solaiman describes six levels of access: fully closed, gradual or staged access, hosted access, cloud or API access, downloadable access, and fully open47. Staged release, as practised for GPT-2 in 2019, leaves time between releases for risk and benefit analysis as capability grows48. For open weights the decision is irreversible in a way nothing else in this chapter is: a released model cannot be recalled, patched or placed behind a kill switch. The release record should therefore carry the capability and dual-use evals, the misuse register, the answer to “what would we do if this is misused, given that we cannot withdraw it?”, and the licence choice. The Open Source Initiative’s definition requires the freedoms to use, study, modify and share, and treats data information, code and parameters as the preferred form for modification49; a licence that restricts fields of use therefore does not meet it.
The legal exemptions for open source are narrower than they sound.
- The AI Act does not apply to AI systems released under free and open-source licences, unless they are placed on the market or put into service as high-risk systems, as prohibited practices or as Art. 50 systems (Art. 2(12))37.
- A GPAI model under a free and open-source licence with public parameters is exempt only from the Annex XI and Annex XII documentation duties; the copyright policy and the training-content summary still apply, and no exemption applies to models with systemic risk (Art. 53(2))2011.
- The Commission’s guidelines treat monetisation as disqualifying: dual licensing (free for academic use, paid for commercial use), paid support that is required to use the model, and processing user data for commercial gain are given as examples50.
Record keeping
For high-risk systems, the provider keeps the technical documentation, the quality management system documentation, changes approved by notified bodies, their decisions and the EU declaration of conformity at the disposal of national authorities for 10 years after placing on the market (Art. 18), and keeps the logs the system generates automatically, where they are under its control, for a period appropriate to the intended purpose of at least six months, unless other law provides otherwise; financial institutions keep them within their financial-services documentation (Art. 19)51. Deployers carry a parallel log duty, covered in chapter 15.
Treat retention as code: each evidence class carries a retention rule keyed to its obligation, signed
records go to write-once storage, a legal hold overrides deletion, and the six-month log floor is a
floor, not a default, reconciled with the GDPR’s storage limitation for personal data in the logs. A
10-year horizon outlives most tools, which argues for open formats (JSON, OSCAL).
Public disclosures
Different audiences are owed different disclosures, and each has something that must not be published.
| Audience | What they get | Channel | What to withhold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authority or notified body | The full technical file, test logs, access to datasets under Annex VII | On request; conformity assessment | Nothing the law requires; mark trade secrets as confidential |
| Deployer | Instructions for use (Art. 13); model and system cards; Annex XII information for GPAI | Contract; documentation portal | Exploitable security detail; weights |
| Affected persons | That AI is used, and how to contest or seek explanation (see chapter 15) | Product interface; notices | Nothing about their own case that a right entitles them to |
| The public | EU database entry; GPAI training-content summary; AB 2013 documentation; bias-audit summaries; published impact assessments | Website; public registers | Red-team exploit detail; personal data; security configuration |
Two non-EU disclosures show the pattern. New York City’s Local Law 144 requires employers using an automated employment decision tool to hold a bias audit by an independent auditor from within the past year, to publish a summary of its results, including the source of the data used, and to notify candidates 10 business days before use52. Canada’s Directive on Automated Decision-Making requires federal institutions to publish the final results of their algorithmic impact assessment on the Open Government Portal before the system goes into production53.
Impact assessments compared
A single system can trigger several impact assessments at once. They overlap on facts (who is affected, what could go wrong, what controls exist) and differ on law, trigger, reviewer and audience. The engineering answer is one shared fact base with several views, not five documents that drift apart.
| Assessment | Performed by | Trigger | When | Reviewed or signed by | Published | Re-assessed when |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI system impact assessment (ISO/IEC 42005) | The organisation developing or providing the system | Organisational policy; ISO/IEC 42001 A.5 | Throughout the lifecycle, from design 54 | Per the organisation’s AI management system | Voluntary | Updated as needed over the lifecycle 54 |
| DPIA (GDPR Art. 35) | The controller | Processing likely to result in high risk; mandatory cases in Art. 35(3) | Before the processing 16 | Controller, with the DPO’s advice; the supervisory authority if high risk remains (Art. 36) | Not required | When the risk of the processing changes (Art. 35(11)) 16 |
| FRIA (AI Act Art. 27) | Deployers that are public bodies or provide public services, and deployers of Annex III 5(b) and (c) systems | Deploying an Annex III high-risk system (not point 2) | Before first use 55 | Results notified to the market surveillance authority | Not required publicly | When any assessed element changes 55 |
| Algorithmic impact assessment (Canada) | Federal institution | Automated decision system under the Directive | Before production 53 | Approved internally; expert review per impact level | Yes, Open Government Portal | On a schedule, and when functionality or scope changes 53 |
| Bias audit (NYC Local Law 144) | Independent auditor, for the employer or agency | Using an automated employment decision tool in NYC | Within one year before use 52 | Independent auditor | Yes, summary of results | Every year 52 |
| Independent model validation (SR 26-2, SS1/23) | Validation function independent of development | Model use in a supervised bank | Generally before first use 7 | Validators with standing to effect change | No | Periodically, and on material change 7 |
Dimensions that make impacts comparable
Score each impact on the same axes whichever assessment it feeds: severity (how bad for the person affected), scale (how many people), reversibility (whether the harm can be undone, and how fast), duration and likelihood. The dimensions are not invented here. Canada’s Directive defines its impact levels by them, from level I, where impacts are likely to be “little to no, easily reversible, and brief”, to level IV, where they are likely to be “very high, irreversible and perpetual”53. The FRIA asks for the affected categories, the specific risks of harm, the oversight measures and the mitigation and complaint arrangements (Art. 27(1))55; the DPIA asks for the processing, its necessity and proportionality, the risks and the measures (Art. 35(7))16. One record with these fields answers both, and Art. 27(4) lets a FRIA build on a DPIA that covers the same ground55.
Performing versus reviewing
The performer owns the facts; the reviewer challenges them. A reviewer who did not write the assessment checks six things: the scope matches the current use-case record; the affected groups include people who never use the system; every risk rating cites evidence (an eval id, a test report, a data profile), not an opinion; every mitigation links to a control that runs; residual risk is accepted by someone with the authority to accept it; and the re-assessment triggers are written as conditions a pipeline can evaluate. An assessment that fails any of the six goes back, however well written it is.
Re-assessment triggers
Encode the triggers so that the registry, not a calendar reminder, reopens the assessment: a new or widened intended purpose; retraining on a new data source; a new affected population, language or jurisdiction; a threshold change; an incident or near miss (chapter 17); a monitoring signal outside its band; new law or guidance; and a scheduled review date. The FRIA-as-Code pattern already does this for the FRIA and its DPIA cross-reference; the same structure generalises, as Impact-Assessment-as-Code, to every assessment in the table.
Maps to: EU AI Act Art. 3(12), 3(13) and 3(23), Art. 9, 10, 11 and Annex IV, Art. 13, 17, 18, 19, 25, 27, 43 and Annexes VI and VII, Art. 47 to 49, Art. 53 and Annexes XI and XII, Art. 72 · GDPR Art. 35 · ISO/IEC 42001 (A.5, A.6, A.7), ISO/IEC 42005, ISO/IEC 5338, ISO/IEC 5259 · NIST AI RMF (Map, Measure) · Layer 01 Govern-as-Code to Layer 05 Assurance & Continuous Compliance. Mappings are illustrative, not a claim of conformity.
What you can do this week
- Write the use-case record for the highest-risk system you have in development, including its out-of-scope uses and its false-positive against false-negative appetite, and store it on the registry entry.
- Freeze the test plan for its next release in the repository: metrics, thresholds, subgroups, repeated runs, and the sample size each threshold needs to be distinguishable from a fail.
- Pick one training dataset and fill its admission record (basis or licence, reservation check, provenance, owner, steward), then make the training job refuse datasets without one.
- Map your current documentation to the Annex IV table above and mark each row generated, written or missing.
- List every impact assessment the system triggers and move their shared facts into one record, with the re-assessment triggers written as conditions.
Sources
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