AMAS — Austria's Banned-Then-Vindicated Jobseeker Profiling Algorithm

Between 2015 and 2018, Austria's Public Employment Service (Arbeitsmarktservice, AMS) developed a regression-based scoring model — later branded AMAS (Arbeitsmarktchancen-Assistenzsystem) — that sorted every registered jobseeker into three employability groups (A: high prospects, B: medium, C: low prospects) using variables including age, gender, nationality, care obligations and disability. Group C members, judged least likely to find work quickly, were to be steered away from AMS's more expensive training programmes on cost-efficiency grounds, while Group A members were also deprioritised in favour of Group B under the theory they would find jobs unaided.

An independent academic study (Allhutter et al., Frontiers in Big Data, 2020) obtained the model's technical documentation and found it explicitly subtracted 0.14 points from a jobseeker's score for being a woman, and further penalised women with declared care obligations — a variable not applied to men. Austria's data protection authority (Datenschutzbehörde) banned the system in August 2020, ruling it constituted an intrusive, insufficiently justified form of automated profiling. AMS appealed, and Austria's Federal Administrative Court (BVwG) sided with AMS in December 2020, before the case was escalated again and finally resolved only in September 2025, when the BVwG ruled AMAS did not violate GDPR Article 22 because a human caseworker retained final sign-off.

The vindication came too late to matter operationally: AMS had already deleted the AMAS project's data in autumn 2020 and, per board chairman Johannes Kopf, wrote off roughly €2.5 million in development costs. Kopf confirmed in September 2025 that AMS has no plans to revive the system, saying too much time had passed and that AMS would likely use different (AI-based) methods today. AMAS was never deployed nationally — it remained a contested pilot for its entire five-year existence.

Read the full analysis: https://www.ots.at/presseaussendung/OTS_20250904_OTS0060/datenschutz-und-innovation-vereinbar-gericht-gibt-ams-nach-jahrelangem-rechtsstreit-um-ams-algorithmus-recht