Overview
- The Federal Cabinet approved the KI-Migrationsverwaltungsgesetz draft that would let specified migration authorities use AI tools in asylum, visa and residence procedures.
- The draft, approved on July 29, 2026, names the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, municipal foreigner offices and the Foreign Office as agencies allowed to use personal application data to develop, validate and test AI systems.
- The law allows automated checks of publicly available internet information only when there are grounded doubts about decision-relevant applicant statements, and it bars final legal assessments from being made by machines.
- The government says the change aims to speed and harmonize case processing, but the draft adds new limits after data-protection and anti-discrimination concerns, including explicit bans on biometric profiling and rules to reduce re-identification risks.
- If Parliament passes the bill, authorities will gain legal cover to run cross-file analyses and train models on real case data, which could shift how resources are deployed and how quickly applicants receive decisions.