Austria’s Constitutional Affairs Committee is scheduled to debate this autumn and winter a sweeping amendment to the General Administrative Procedure Act (AVG) that would, for the first time, allow authorities to issue fully automated, legally binding administrative decisions with no human reviewing the individual outcome. The draft bill (89/ME) would also let chatbots treat what citizens tell them as formal submissions in proceedings, and leaves which types of proceedings qualify for full automation largely to secondary legislation, with no statutory exclusion for sensitive areas such as asylum or social welfare.

EDRi member epicenter.works has sent an open letter to the committee arguing the plan is incompatible with fundamental rights. Unlike classic rule-based systems, it argues, large language models hallucinate (specialised legal AI shows error rates of roughly 17-33%), operate as black boxes not fully explainable even in principle, and carry systematic biases that cannot be engineered away by choosing a different vendor. Examples cited: Austria’s state chatbot ‘ida’ invented a non-existent government minister, and in a July 2026 UK Upper Tribunal case an asylum refusal appears to have cited a policy document that never existed, likely an AI hallucination.

Further points raised: the power to define the scope of automation would be spread across potentially thousands of separate decision-makers, including Austria’s roughly 2,092 municipalities; citizens would have two weeks to challenge an automated decision while authorities could revoke one for up to two months; and Austria still lacks the independent AI oversight body called for under the EU AI Act.

epicenter.works demands a human making the final call as the rule, a statutory exclusion for complex or fundamental-rights-sensitive proceedings, and these limits set by parliament in law rather than by later regulation. The organisation considers Austria an outlier in Europe but holds that claim loosely, and is asking people in other countries to report comparable laws or confirm none exist. https://edri.org/our-work/no-human-required-austrias-plan-for-ai-only-government-decisions/