What happens during an AIR assessment
The twelve steps AIR runs on your documents, what goes in, and what comes out.
· 2 min read
An AIR assessment reads your documents about an AI system and writes a risk report from them. One assessment uses 1 credit and usually takes 8 to 10 minutes. You can keep working while it runs.
What goes in
- On the AIR website, you upload documents about the system: project briefs, design notes, architecture documents, policies, model cards. AIR accepts PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, text, Markdown, CSV and JSON files.
- In Claude Code, Claude reads the code on your computer and writes two short files: a summary of the system and the code facts, with file and line numbers. You see both before anything is sent. They quote short snippets, never whole source files.
The twelve steps
While the assessment runs, AIR shows which step it is on.
- Reading the documents and profiling the system. What the system does, who it affects, which AI tools it uses and what data each one gets.
- Splitting the evidence into passages. Every finding later points back to one of these passages.
- Finding the controls already in place. Safeguards your documents describe.
- Checking each risk theme. All 63 themes, one family at a time.
- Combining related risks.
- Describing each risk. Severity, likelihood and who is affected.
- Mapping controls to risks. The safeguards each risk needs.
- Applying the controls to the risks. Which safeguards your documents show, and which are missing.
- Ranking the risks. Priority comes from severity and likelihood together.
- Finding the EU AI Act facts. The facts the EU AI Act checks depend on.
- Setting the EU AI Act tier.
- Writing the report.
What comes out
- A risk list. Each of the 63 themes lands in one group: Outstanding, Needs evidence, Potential or Ruled out.
- Controls. The safeguards each risk needs, with what AIR found and the action needed.
- The EU AI Act tier, and the questions that can still change it.
- Evidence. Every passage the report quotes, linked back to its document.
When the report is ready, some questions may be open. Answering them does not use another credit.