Timeline of Developments
Last development: September 4, 2025
- September 4, 2025
AMS wins, but says it won't revive the project anyway
Despite the legal win, AMS director Johannes Kopf tells reporters the agency has no plans to bring AMAS back: "We will not revive AMAS now; too much time has passed, and today one would probably use AI instead of the regression calculations of that time." Because the underlying data and models were already destroyed in 2020, the ruling settles the legal question - AMAS, as built, did not violate GDPR - without reviving the system itself.
Source: The International - September 1, 2025
The Federal Administrative Court's final ruling: this system did not violate GDPR
On remand, the BVwG (case W256 2235360-1/36E) again finds that AMAS did not violate GDPR Article 22 - and this time goes further, annulling the DSB's 2020 ban outright and rejecting further ordinary appeal. The court's reasoning centers on how much real authority AMS advisors had: their involvement, the court says, "is not merely formal, but rather substantive in nature" - they were required to weigh factors the algorithm couldn't see (motivation, living situation, language skills, caregiving responsibilities), document any disagreement with the algorithm's score, and their corrected value could not be silently overwritten by the system. This is the same AMAS system the DSB banned in 2020, not a different, rebuilt product - the case simply took five years and multiple rounds of appeal to resolve, with the courts and the regulator disagreeing along the way.
Source: ppc.land - December 21, 2023
Austria's Supreme Administrative Court sends the case back for another look
The Verwaltungsgerichtshof ("VwGH") - Austria's highest administrative court, one level above the BVwG - annuls the BVwG's 2020 ruling and remands the case for fresh fact-finding. The VwGH's own announcement points to a EU Court of Justice ruling issued just two weeks earlier, on December 7, 2023 (the "SCHUFA" automated credit-scoring case), which held that an automated score can count as a prohibited decision under GDPR Article 22 even when a human is formally involved, if the score in practice determines the outcome. The VwGH says the BVwG hadn't adequately examined whether AMAS's scores actually drove AMS staff's real-world decisions.
- December 18, 2020
The Federal Administrative Court sides with AMS in its first ruling
Austria's Federal Administrative Court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht, "BVwG") - the court that hears appeals of the DSB's decisions - issues its first ruling in the case and annuls the DSB's ban, siding with AMS. This is not the end of the matter: the DSB pursues a further, ordinary appeal to Austria's highest administrative court, so this ruling ends up being an early round in a fight that runs another five years, not the final word.
- October 1, 2020
AMS deletes the AMAS data and models
The exact date isn't public - reporting places this only in "fall" or "autumn" 2020, and the date shown here is a placeholder for sorting purposes only. In response to the DSB's ban, AMS deletes essentially everything it had built for AMAS: the statistical models and the data behind them. Reporting on the eventual 2025 court outcome describes this as destroying roughly 2.5 million euros of development work in one stroke - years before any court had the final word on whether the ban itself was actually valid.
Source: The International - August 16, 2020
Austria's Data Protection Authority bans the system
Austria's Data Protection Authority (Datenschutzbehörde, "DSB") - the country's privacy regulator, not a court - issues a decision prohibiting AMS from using the system, officially named AMAS (Arbeitsmarktchancen-Assistenzsystem, "Labor Market Opportunities Assistance System"), from January 1, 2021 onward unless a proper legal basis was put in place by then. The DSB's stated reasons: it found no adequate legal basis in Austrian law for processing this data, and it found the setup amounted to a prohibited automated individual decision under GDPR Article 22 - Europe's rule limiting decisions "based solely on automated processing" that significantly affect a person. This is a regulatory ruling, not a lawsuit verdict, and AMS immediately signaled it would appeal.
- October 6, 2019
AlgorithmWatch reveals how AMS plans to score jobseekers - and that it penalizes women and disabled people
Journalist Nicolas Kayser-Bril, writing for the researcher/advocacy group AlgorithmWatch, reports that Austria's Public Employment Service (AMS) is preparing to roll out a scoring algorithm the following year. AMS started evaluating labor-market chances for different groups in 2016; in 2019, satisfied with a statistical analysis built by external contractor Synthesis Forschung at a cost of 240,000 euros, AMS announced it would begin automatically scoring each jobseeker. Depending on the score, a person would land in one of three groups: Group A (needs no help), Group B (might benefit from retraining), or Group C (deemed unemployable, and offered less help). Internal documentation reviewed by AlgorithmWatch shows the model assigns a negative weight to being a woman, to having a disability, and to being over 30 - and that women with children are penalized while men with children are not. A Cambridge law professor quoted in the piece, Catherine Barnard, says this kind of scoring is "likely to fall afoul" of the EU's main gender-discrimination directive.
Source: AlgorithmWatch