Chapter IX · Section 4 · Remedies
Article 86 — Right to explanation of individual decision-making
▼ Primary text, verbatim. Our annotations appear below, visibly separated.
1. Any affected person subject to a decision which is taken by the deployer on the basis of the output from a high-risk AI system listed in Annex III, with the exception of systems listed under point 2 thereof, and which produces legal effects or similarly significantly affects that person in a way that they consider to have an adverse impact on their health, safety or fundamental rights shall have the right to obtain from the deployer clear and meaningful explanations of the role of the AI system in the decision-making procedure and the main elements of the decision taken.
2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to the use of AI systems for which exceptions from, or restrictions to, the obligation under that paragraph follow from Union or national law in compliance with Union law.
3. This Article shall apply only to the extent that the right referred to in paragraph 1 is not otherwise provided for under Union law.
This text is meant purely as a documentation tool and has no legal effect. The Union's institutions do not assume any liability for its contents. The authentic versions of the relevant acts, including their preambles, are those published in the Official Journal of the European Union and available in EUR-Lex.
What this means for you
In your terms · Right to explanation of individual decisions
Meaningful explanation is bounded by what the system exposes: factors, weights or at least the role the output played have to be reconstructable.
- Decision factors captured per output
In your terms · Right to explanation of individual decisions
The explanation is a user-facing process: who requests it, what they receive, and how fast. Without decision logs it is unanswerable.
- Explanation request process
Failure smells likeSomeone affected by a decision asks why, and the honest answer is that the system scored them and nobody can say on what.
In your terms · Right to explanation of individual decisions
Case law is still drawing the line between explanation and trade secrets; watch it before promising less.
Obligations derived from this article
Scenarios that touch this provision
A credit-decision feature
Illustrative
A model scores applicants for a lending product and the score drives the decision, with a human able to override it.
- Your role
- ProviderDeployer
- Where it lands
- High risk 2 Dec 2027
- Decided by
- Annex III, point 5(b): systems intended to evaluate the creditworthiness of natural persons or establish their credit score, with the exception of systems used to detect financial fraud.
What applies
- Risk management system
- Data and data governance
- Technical documentation
- Automatic recording of events
- Human oversight
- Accuracy, robustness and cybersecurity
- Deployer obligations
- Fundamental rights impact assessment
- Conformity assessment
- Registration in the EU database
- Right to explanation of individual decisions
What you have to be able to produce
- Adversarial and injection test suite
- Annex IV technical file
- Bias examination report
- Conformity route decision per system
- Dataset cards with provenance
- Decision factors captured per output
- Decision-correlation IDs across services
- Declared accuracy levels and metrics
- Deployer-side log retention
- Deployment instructions record per system
- Doc generation wired into CI
- Documentation format decision on record
- Escalation path for emergent risk
- Explanation request process
- Field-risk signal feed into the register
- Foreseeable-misuse analysis per release
- Fundamental rights impact assessment
- Inference event schema
- Kill switch and override, with tests
- Living risk register with review cadence
- Model performance SLOs with alerts
- Named oversight roles
- Oversight runbook
- Oversight UX with override path
- Per-run lineage records
- Registration entries per system
- Replay runbook
- Representativeness note for the target population
- Risk-to-control mapping in the design docs
- Scope determination on record
- Stated assumptions per data set
- Tamper-evident log storage
- Worker information notice
What would change the answer
- Unlike the hiring case, this one carries a fundamental rights impact assessment: Article 27(1) names Annex III point 5(b) explicitly.
- Restricting the system to fraud detection takes it out of point 5(b). Scoring the same people for a lending decision puts it back.
- An affected person can ask for an explanation of the individual decision under Article 86, and that explanation comes from the same records Article 12 asked you to keep.
If you would rather not read the law
The basics page explains the Regulation's own categories in order: scope, role, tier, date. The engineering view groups the obligations by the platform capability they demand.