Annex IV §1(a) — Intended Purpose Statement (EU AI Act)

What §1(a) actually requires

Annex IV §1(a) of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 requires the technical documentation to state the intended purpose of the AI system, the name of the provider, and the version of the system reflecting its relation to previous versions.

The intended purpose is the most important sentence in the entire Article 11 file. It defines:

• Scope of obligation. What the system is for determines whether the Article 6 high-risk classification applies.
• Scope of foreseeable harm. What the system is not for narrows the Article 9 risk register.
• Article 25 promotion risk. A deployer who changes the intended purpose to a high-risk use case becomes a provider under Article 25(c).

Article 3(12) definition

Article 3(12) defines intended purpose as "the use for which an AI system is intended by the provider, including the specific context and conditions of use, as specified in the information supplied by the provider in the instructions for use, promotional or sales materials and statements, as well as in the technical documentation."

So the intended purpose is not just the §1(a) sentence. It is the consistent statement across:

• The Annex IV §1(a) entry.
• The Article 13 instructions for use.
• Marketing collateral and sales materials.
• The Article 49 EU Database registration.

Inconsistencies are non-conformity evidence.

What to write

A defensible intended-purpose statement has four elements:

1. The use case, named precisely. Not "decision support" — "real-time scoring of consumer-loan applications between PLN 5,000 and PLN 80,000 in retail banking, returning approve/decline/human-review."
2. The deployer profile. EU law firms, public hospitals, regulated banks. Restricting deployer type narrows the risk surface.
3. Geographic scope. Trained and validated in/for which jurisdictions, languages, populations.
4. Excluded uses. This is the load-bearing element. Exclusions narrow the Article 9 foreseeable-harm scope.

A worked example

"DriverScore v2.4 is a supervised-learning classifier that ranks long-haul drivers on a 0–100 safety score using telematics features. Intended purpose: internal shift allocation and voluntary safety coaching within Rondom Logistiek B.V. and its Group entities, deployed by safety-certified shift coordinators. Validated for Dutch and German operations; not validated for any other geography. Excluded uses: dismissal decisions, contractual penalty calculation, insurance-premium pricing, cross-employer benchmarking, and any insurance-underwriting purpose. Provider: Rondom Tech B.V. Version: v2.4.1 (released 2026-03-12; replaces v2.4.0 of 2026-02-04 — see Annex IV §5 for change details)."

That paragraph is two-thirds of an Annex IV §1(a) entry. The remaining third ties to the §1(c) version-update procedure.

Inline crosswalk

• ISO/IEC 42001:2023 Clause 4.1 — Understanding the organisation and its context.
• NIST AI RMF MAP 1.1 — Intended purposes, potentially beneficial uses, context-specific laws and norms are understood.

Common mistakes

• Marketing-prose intended purpose. The audience is a regulator, not a buyer.
• No exclusion list. A high-risk system with no excluded uses signals an unbounded risk surface.
• Inconsistency between Annex IV §1(a), the Article 13 IFU, the EU Database registration, and marketing.
• Updating the intended purpose informally without §5 entry.

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Disclaimer. Reference; not legal advice. Verify with counsel. Reg text from Regulation (EU) 2024/1689.