White paper · v1.2 · 25 October 2026 · CC BY 4.0
Unseen AI: what Europe's public sector buys, and what its procurement registers cannot show
Pablo Ramos-Sánchez · doi:10.5281/zenodo.23561547
- Registers record what is bought, not whether it contains AI. Some AI is bought by brand, and some is built into products: no notice says so.
- Even named AI is counted wrongly: keywords catch buyers' names, file codes and catering, and miss 4% to 45% of the AI bought.
- Governance is rarely bought: a search of TED and Spain finds it in about 1 in 100 AI purchases, and a random check shows that this is a floor.
- Most AI is bought small, below what TED sees: in Spain, minor contracts are 77% of AI purchases and about 4% of their value.
How it was measured: 2,317 purchases drawn at random, labelled under a written rule by a review agent and then audited in full by the author; the 31 that cannot be decided from the text enter every count as a range. Version 1.2 adds a blind check of 186 more purchases, read by the author and by an independent agent without seeing each other. Not peer reviewed yet. Corrections and comments go into the next version.
Cite as
Ramos-Sánchez, P. (2026). Unseen AI: what Europe's public sector buys, and what its procurement registers cannot show (v1.2) [White paper]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23561547