Why Does This Matter?

Mobley v. Workday and ACLU v. Aon are both about private companies selling hiring tools to employers. This case is different on almost every axis: a government agency built the tool, a privacy regulator - not a discrimination plaintiff - brought the fight, and the law that actually decided the outcome was Europe's data protection rule, not an anti-discrimination statute.

It's public power, not a private vendor's product

Workday and Aon are companies selling software to employers, who then use it on job applicants. AMS is the government body making decisions about the public benefits and services a jobseeker receives directly from the state. That changes the stakes: there's no employer in the middle, and the "customer" relationship that shapes a lot of AI-hiring-vendor law doesn't really apply. It's a case about how much automation a government can use in delivering a public service, not about whether a company misled its business customers or broke a civil rights law. (source: The International)

It was fought under privacy law, not anti-discrimination law

The scoring criteria that made AMAS notorious - lower scores for women, disabled people, and older applicants - are what drew public criticism in 2019. But the legal fight that Austria's regulator and courts actually spent five years on was about GDPR Article 22: whether the system counted as a prohibited "automated decision," not whether its criteria were discriminatory. That's a narrower, more technical question - it turns on how much genuine judgment a human reviewer exercises, not on whether the underlying scoring is fair. See What Is the Algorithm for what Article 22 actually requires. (source: ppc.land)

The legal fight lasted five years and flipped more than once - over one system, not two

It's tempting to read this case as "the algorithm was ruled illegal in 2020, then cleared in 2025" - but that blurs together two different things. The Datenschutzbehörde's August 2020 decision was a regulatory ban, not a court ruling, and even that wasn't the last word: Austria's Federal Administrative Court (BVwG) actually sided with AMS in its very first ruling, on December 18, 2020, annulling the ban. The DSB then escalated further, and Austria's Supreme Administrative Court (VwGH) sent the case back for another look in December 2023, pointing to a European Court of Justice ruling on a similar automated-scoring dispute. Only after that renewed review did the BVwG issue its final ruling, on September 1, 2025, again finding for AMS - this time conclusively. Every one of those rulings is about the same system, AMAS, not a redesigned successor product. What changed between 2020 and 2025 wasn't the software - it was which body's read of Article 22 was controlling at each stage of a genuinely long appeals process. (source: VwGH press release, dataprotect.at)

It's a useful contrast to a similar case that came out the other way

Dutch courts examined a comparable "is a human really in the loop" question in a 2021 dispute between Uber and its drivers over automated deactivation decisions. There, the Amsterdam Court of Appeals found Uber's human review was "not much more than a purely symbolic act" and ruled the decisions were effectively automated, violating GDPR Article 22. Austria's BVwG reached the opposite conclusion about AMAS - finding AMS advisors' review substantive, not symbolic - because it found specific, documented safeguards: advisors had to actively record any disagreement with the algorithm's score, and the system could not overwrite their correction. Read side by side, the two cases are a real illustration of where EU courts are drawing the line on what counts as genuine human oversight, rather than a token human sign-off. (source: TechCrunch on the Uber ruling; ppc.land on the AMAS ruling)

It won in court, but the system is dead anyway

AMS ultimately won a full legal vindication - but it's a vindication with nothing left to apply it to. AMS deleted the AMAS data and models back in fall 2020, in response to the original ban, destroying roughly 2.5 million euros of development work. By the time the courts cleared the system in September 2025, AMS's own director said the agency has no plans to revive it: too much time has passed, and the agency would likely build something different - probably AI-based - today. It's a genuinely different kind of ending than Mobley v. Workday or ACLU v. Aon, where the underlying tools are both still in active use while their cases proceed. (source: The International)

To see how this unfolded step by step, check the timeline.