Who's Involved?

This isn't a lawsuit with a plaintiff and a defendant. It's a government agency's own tool, challenged by its own country's privacy regulator, and fought out in the country's administrative courts - so "who's involved" means who built it, who challenged it, and who ruled on it.

Who built it: Austria's Public Employment Service (AMS)

The Arbeitsmarktservice ("AMS") is Austria's public employment service - a government agency that runs unemployment benefits and job-search assistance nationwide. Starting in 2016, AMS ran a program to evaluate how different groups of jobseekers fared in the labor market, and by 2019 had commissioned an external contractor, Synthesis Forschung, to build a statistical model - at a cost of 240,000 euros - that could automatically score each jobseeker's "labor market chances." AMS's director, Johannes Kopf, has been the agency's public face on this project throughout, including defending it against early criticism and, later, commenting on the final court ruling. (source: AlgorithmWatch, The International)

Who challenged it: Austria's Data Protection Authority

The Datenschutzbehörde ("DSB") is Austria's independent data protection regulator - the body that enforces the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) domestically. It isn't a court, but it can issue binding decisions, and on August 16, 2020, it did: a decision prohibiting AMS from using the scoring system (officially named AMAS) from January 1, 2021 onward, unless AMS could establish a proper legal basis by then. The DSB's reasoning combined two separate problems: it found no adequate legal basis in Austrian law for processing this data, and separately, it found the setup amounted to a prohibited automated individual decision under GDPR Article 22. (source: the BVwG's own 2025 ruling, which cites the exact DSB decision under appeal; The International)

Who raised the alarm first: researchers and AlgorithmWatch

Before the DSB acted, it was researchers and journalists who put the scoring criteria in public view. AlgorithmWatch - a nonprofit that investigates automated decision-making systems - published a detailed report in October 2019, based on internal AMS documentation, showing the model assigned negative weight to being a woman, to having a disability, and to being over 30, and that women with children were penalized while men with children were not. The report quoted Cambridge law professor Catherine Barnard, a specialist in EU discrimination law, saying the approach was "likely to fall afoul" of the EU's main gender-discrimination directive. Austrian digital-rights groups, including epicenter.works, kept public pressure on the system in the years that followed. (source: AlgorithmWatch, OECD.AI incident report)

Who ruled on it: two Austrian courts, twice each

AMS appealed the DSB's ban to the Bundesverwaltungsgericht ("BVwG"), Austria's Federal Administrative Court - the court that reviews decisions by regulators like the DSB. The BVwG sided with AMS in a first ruling on December 18, 2020. The DSB then escalated further, to the Verwaltungsgerichtshof ("VwGH"), Austria's Supreme Administrative Court - the country's highest court for administrative-law disputes, one level above the BVwG. On December 21, 2023, the VwGH annulled that first BVwG ruling and sent the case back for further fact-finding, pointing to a European Court of Justice ruling issued two weeks earlier on a similar automated-scoring question. On remand, the BVwG ruled a second time on September 1, 2025 - again finding for AMS, and this time conclusively. See Why It's Significant for what changed between those two BVwG rulings. (source: VwGH's own press release, ppc.land)

For what actually happened and when, see the timeline.