Article 78: confidentiality of what you submit to an authority

Paragraph 3 provides that, without prejudice to paragraphs 1 and 2, information exchanged on a confidential basis between the national competent authorities or between national competent authorities and the Commission shall not be disclosed without prior consultation of the originating national competent authority and the deployer when high-risk AI systems referred to in point 1, 6 or 7 of Annex III are used by law enforcement, border control, immigration or asylum authorities and when such disclosure would jeopardise public and national security interests. This exchange of information shall not cover sensitive operational data in relation to the activities of law enforcement, border control, immigration or asylum authorities. The second subparagraph of paragraph 3 provides that when the law enforcement, immigration or asylum authorities are providers of high-risk AI systems referred to in point 1, 6 or 7 of Annex III, the technical documentation referred to in Annex IV shall remain within the premises of those authorities, that those authorities shall ensure that the market surveillance authorities referred to in Article 74(8) and (9), as applicable, can, upon request, immediately access the documentation or obtain a copy thereof, and that only staff of the market surveillance authority holding the appropriate level of security clearance shall be allowed to access that documentation or any copy thereof.

Paragraph 4 provides that paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 shall not affect the rights or obligations of the Commission, Member States and their relevant authorities, as well as those of notified bodies, with regard to the exchange of information and the dissemination of warnings, including in the context of cross-border cooperation, nor shall they affect the obligations of the parties concerned to provide information under criminal law of the Member States. Paragraph 5 provides that the Commission and Member States may exchange, where necessary and in accordance with relevant provisions of international and trade agreements, confidential information with regulatory authorities of third countries with which they have concluded bilateral or multilateral confidentiality arrangements guaranteeing an adequate level of confidentiality.

Read this article as the answer to the question your supplier asks and that you ask yourself as soon as you have to hand something over. The protection is real and it names source code expressly, which is unusually explicit in Union law. But it is a duty of the recipient and not a right of refusal for the party submitting. Article 21(1) requires the provider, upon a reasoned request, to give all the information and documentation necessary to demonstrate conformity; Article 78 does not say you may withhold anything, it says what the recipient must do afterwards. Anyone who inverts that and refuses on grounds of confidentiality is legally empty-handed. Two limits on top, because they get missed in practice. The first is Article 5 of Directive (EU) 2016/943: that exception sits verbatim in point (a) and it covers, among other things, exercising the right to freedom of expression and information and revealing misconduct in the general public interest. The second is paragraph 4: between authorities, and when disseminating warnings, confidentiality does not operate as a lock. Your file can therefore reach another Member State without that being a breach. What does work in your favour is paragraph 2. That is a strict necessity test on the request itself, with a retention limit attached: deletion as soon as the data is no longer needed for the purpose for which it was obtained. That is a question you can put to an authority and whose answer you can record.

There is an asymmetry in this article that is rarely noticed. Paragraph 3 gives one set of parties a heavy extra protection: where a high-risk system from point 1, 6 or 7 of Annex III is used by a law enforcement, border control, immigration or asylum authority, information exchanged on a confidential basis may not be disclosed without prior consultation of the originating authority and the deployer, and the technical documentation stays physically within the premises of that authority where it is itself the provider. For a commercial provider in exactly the same Annex III areas that arrangement does not apply. The practical conclusion is not that one is better protected than the other, but that you need to know which side you are on: if you supply such an authority, your documentation travels a different path from your own archive, and you settle that path in the contract rather than after the fact. Note also what this article does not govern. It says nothing about the public availability of the EU database in Article 71, whose public part is meant to be found, and nothing about what a deployer must explain to an affected person under Article 86. Confidentiality towards a regulator and transparency towards a citizen are two separate tracks in this Regulation, and it is a mistake to try to close one with the other.