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Risk tier

By Updated

An organisation's own rating of an AI use case, computed at intake by a versioned policy from declared profile fields such as autonomy, decision impact, exposure, reversibility, vulnerable groups, data class and third parties. The tier selects the assessments, evals, thresholds, approvers and review cadence a system must pass; it sits beside the legal classification, not in place of it.

Developed in
ch. 13, Contributing factors and the use-case risk profile
ch. 05, Pattern: Use-Case Intake & Risk Tiering
Chapters
ch. 05, Patterns · ch. 06, The Role · ch. 12, Governance Program · ch. 13, Risk Management
Contrast with
High-risk AI system
Source
Defined by this Body of Knowledge: the section it is developed in is the source

Where it is used

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

Patterns that use this term

2 pattern pages use the term, most mentions first.

  • Contributing factor

    A property of a system or its context (autonomy, exposure, reversibility, vulnerable groups, data sensitivity, opacity) that moves the likelihood or severity…

  • Use-case record

    The intake record for a proposed AI use: business context, intended purpose and the uses ruled out, affected persons, decision authority, success metrics and…

  • Deployment Decision Record (DDR)

    The artefact that records the decision to deploy an AI system: objective, the people it acts on, negative space, risk tier and obligations, per-group…

  • Abstention band

    A range of scores in which a system does not act on its own but routes the case to a human reviewer.

  • Autonomy

    In the EU AI Act and OECD texts, some degree of independence of action from human involvement, which almost every AI system has.

  • Evals

    Automated tests of a model's or agent's behaviour (capability, safety and adversarial), run as controls, not as one-off research.

Sources

No external source: the term is coined or used in a specific sense by this Body of Knowledge, and the section linked under "Developed in" is its source.

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

Cite this term

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

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026risktier,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Risk tier}},
  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/risk-tier}
}