A letter from the staff committee of the Court of Justice of the European Union demands the EU Commission explain its plans to use AI to deal with an increase in candidates for EU jobs, deploring that plans for the AI tool, built on tech developed by US AI company Anthropic and hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, have been kept hidden. A record number of people, over 170 000, applied this year for the entrance exams to become permanent administrators in European Union institutions, with only 1490 open vacancies. For the first time, selection won’t be supervised solely by the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO) and the individual institutions; under a pilot initiative, the process will be complemented with an AI tool called Job Matching Application, developed by Accenture with Anthropic’s large language model (LLM) and hosted on AWS, scheduled to be tested this summer. The committee, raising concerns in its 2 July letter, claims to have only been made aware of this project through the press and addresses compliance with equal treatment, non-discrimination, transparency, good administration, and personal data protection. The letter argues the EU has failed at the first post, noting the AI Act classifies recruitment AI as high-risk, and warns that even if a human makes the final decision, technology can be “decisive”.