Germany's Marktplatz der KI-Möglichkeiten — A Voluntary Federal AI Register With Documented Gaps

Germany's Federal Ministry of the Interior (now the Bundesministerium für Digitales und Staatsmodernisierung) launched the Marktplatz der KI-Möglichkeiten (MaKI) in early 2025 as a public database where government agencies can voluntarily list their AI applications. As of December 2025 it held roughly 240 entries at federal level, and the IT-Planungsrat — the joint federal/state digital-government body — began expanding it to state and local administrations, with full institutional ownership due to transfer by early 2027.
Investigative reporting by netzpolitik.org and analysis from the digital-rights NGO AlgorithmWatch found the register falls well short of a genuine transparency mechanism: participation is voluntary, more than a third of listed applications lack the risk assessments the EU AI Act requires, data is published in an unwieldy spreadsheet format, and information on licensing, partners and legal basis is frequently missing. Legal scholar Jonas Botta has argued the register must become mandatory — citing the Netherlands' Algoritmeregister as the model to follow — for it to protect citizens' rights rather than mainly serve government interests.
MaKI is a genuine, operating register at meaningful scale, but its well-documented shortcomings make it a useful cautionary example of what a voluntary, self-reported approach to algorithmic transparency delivers in practice.

Read the full analysis: https://netzpolitik.org/2025/transparenzregister-mit-luecken-ki-nutzung-der-oeffentlichen-verwaltung-bleibt-undurchsichtig/