What is human oversight under the AI Act?
Human oversight is the Article 14 requirement that high-risk AI systems be designed and developed so that natural persons can effectively oversee them during use — aiming to prevent or minimise risks to health, safety and fundamental rights. The measures must enable overseers to understand the system’s capacities and limits, remain aware of automation bias, correctly interpret outputs, decide not to use or to disregard an output, and intervene or halt the system.
Split responsibility
- Provider: builds oversight into the product — interface affordances, confidence signals, stop controls, and instructions specifying the human role;
- Deployer: assigns oversight to people with the competence, training, authority and time to do it (Article 26) — an untrained click-approver does not count;
- For remote biometric identification, verification by at least two persons applies as a rule.
Why it matters
“Human in the loop” claims are tested against these criteria in audits, FRIAs and vendor questionnaires — rubber-stamp workflows are the classic finding. KVKK’s protections around automated decisions point the same way. Related: conformity assessment.