AI Governance Engineer
GitHub

Lawful basis

By Updated

One of the six grounds in GDPR Article 6 that make processing of personal data lawful: consent, contract, legal obligation, vital interests, public task and legitimate interests 1. For AI, each processing moment (training, retrieval, inference, logging) needs its own basis, recorded per dataset and stage.

Developed in
ch. 19, Lawful basis for training versus inference
Chapters
ch. 19, Privacy & AI
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

9 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

Patterns that use this term

3 pattern pages use the term, most mentions first.

  • Dataset admission gate

    A pipeline control that lets a training job read only datasets whose admission record is complete and signed by the data owner: lawful basis or licence…

  • Data provenance

    Information about the entities, activities and people involved in producing data, used to judge its quality and trustworthiness.

  • Data card

    Structured, versioned documentation of a dataset (provenance, lawful basis, rights, composition and known limitations) maintained as code alongside the system.

Sources

  1. [1] Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation) (Arts. 4(1), 4(5), 4(7), 4(8), 4(12), 4(14), 5, 6, 9, 12(3), 22, 25, 28(2) and 28(4), 30, 33, 35; Recital 26). Publications Office of the EU (EUR-Lex). 2016-04-27. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj/eng (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Lawful basis. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/lawful-basis. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026lawfulbasis,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Lawful basis}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/lawful-basis}
}