European Observatory on AI Standards

Method

How we read.

The readings on this site rest on a discipline. It is worth stating the shape of it, so the work is not mistaken for opinion. It is not worth stating more than that: the substance is in the briefs, and the part that matters does not travel as a recipe.

Primary text, not memory.

Every claim is checked against the source itself — the consolidated Regulation, the Official Journal, the draft standard as circulated. Nothing is paraphrased from recollection, and nothing is inherited from a secondary summary. If a point cannot be traced to a provision, it does not get made.

Objective verifiability is the test.

A requirement that cannot be checked the same way twice is treated as unfinished. Arbitrary thresholds, subjective wording and open-ended escape clauses are named as such rather than smoothed over. That single test does most of the work, and applying it well is harder than it looks.

The reading is not a template.

The rest is judgment, formed inside the committees where these standards are drafted, against years of how the machinery actually behaves. That does not compress into a prompt or a checklist. The method, in the end, is the people applying it; the output is the briefs.

That is the useful amount to say. If you want the substance, it is in the briefs themselves, and the standing behind them is set out in In the room.