Article 36

‘minor’ or ‘child’ means any natural person under the age of 18;

‘guardian’ means any person holding parental responsibility over a minor pursuant to applicable national law;

‘AI companion’ means an AI system, including a general-purpose AI system, that provides sustained, personalised interaction or companionship which simulates or facilitates a social, emotional or interpersonal relationship with a user;

‘general conversational chatbot’ means a general-purpose AI system with general conversational functionalities for direct interaction with users that is capable of providing assistance across multiple domains and tasks; this definition excludes AI systems whose conversational functionality is limited to a specialised service, task or pre-defined set of functions, including specialised customer-service, business operation, technical-support, transactional, educational, information-retrieval, industrial or manufacturing AI applications;

‘online games’ means a video game or video gaming platform;

‘video game’ means an information society service as defined in Article 1(1), point (b), of Directive (EU) 2015/1535, that allows the recipients of the service to engage, by means of application accessed locally or remotely, including through the use of a durable medium and that involves interaction with a user interface or input device to generate visual feedback from a display device in a simulated environment for play or entertainment purposes;

‘video gaming platform’ means an “online platform" as defined in Article 3, point (i) of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, that involves interaction with a user interface or input device to generate visual feedback from a display device in a simulated environment [for play or entertainment purposes];

‘age verification’ means a process or system for establishing, with a high degree of certainty, whether the recipient or user of a system of the service has attained a specific age or age threshold, on the basis of information derived from identification documents or other reliable, verified sources of identification;

‘age assurance’ means the set of methods, that can be used to determine, estimate or verify the age of a natural person, encompassing age estimation and age verification and excluding self-declaration by recipients of the service;

‘age signal’ means any data, attribute, token, credential, or other information provided, transmitted, or generated for the purpose of establishing, verifying, or demonstrating a specific age, age threshold, or age range of an individual;

‘EU age verification solution’ means an age verification solution that meets the requirements of the EU Age Verification Scheme and is certified by a public authority and included in the EU list of EU age verification solutions after notification by a Member State;

‘EU list of providers of EU proof of age attestations’ means the list established and published by the Commission of providers issuing EU proof of age attestations

‘EU list of EU age verification solutions’ means the list established and published by the Commission of EU age verification solutions certified as conforming with the EU Age Verification Scheme and notified by Member States;

‘EU Age Verification Scheme’ means a scheme for the attestation of attributes as defined in Article 2(4) of Commission implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1569 with the rules applicable to providers of EU age verification solutions and of EU proof of age attestation, their approval and inclusion in the EU list of providers of EU proof of age attestations and the certification of EU age verification solutions for their inclusion in the EU list of EU age verification solutions;

‘proof of age attestation’ means an electronic attestation of attributes, as defined in Article 3(44) of Regulation (EU) No 910/2014, that allows the authentication of the fact that its holder meets a given age, age threshold, or age range;

‘tools for guardians’ means software, features, functionalities, or applications designed to help guardians accompany minors' online activity to ensure their privacy, safety and well-being.

‘online platform’ means a hosting service that, at the request of a recipient of the service, stores and disseminates information to the public, unless that activity is a minor and purely ancillary feature of another service or a minor functionality of the principal service and, for objective and technical reasons, cannot be used without that other service, and the integration of the feature or functionality into the other service is not a means to circumvent the applicability of this Regulation;

‘recipient of the service’ means any natural or legal person who uses an intermediary service, in particular for the purposes of seeking information or making it accessible;

‘online interface’ means any software, including a website or a part thereof, and applications, including mobile applications;

‘recommender system’ means a fully or partially automated system used by an online platform to suggest in its online interface specific information to recipients of the service or prioritise that information, including as a result of a search initiated by the recipient of the service or otherwise determining the relative order or prominence of information displayed;

‘online social networking service’ means a platform that enables end users to connect and communicate with each other, share content and discover other users and content across multiple devices and, in particular, via chats, posts, videos and recommendations;

‘video-sharing platform service’ means a video-sharing platform service as defined in Article 1(1), point (aa), of Directive 2010/13/EU;

‘video-sharing platform service’ means a service as defined by Articles 56 and 57 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, where the principal purpose of the service or of a dissociable section thereof or an essential functionality of the service is devoted to providing programmes, user-generated videos, or both, to the general public, for which the video-sharing platform provider does not have editorial responsibility, in order to inform, entertain or educate, by means of electronic communications networks within the meaning of point (a) of Article 2 of Directive 2002/21/EC and the organisation of which is determined by the video-sharing platform provider, including by automatic means or algorithms in particular by displaying, tagging and sequencing;

‘software application stores’ means a type of online intermediation services, which is focused on software applications as the intermediated product or service;

‘AI system’ means a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment, and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments;

‘general-purpose AI system’ means an AI system which is based on a general-purpose AI model and which has the capability to serve a variety of purposes, both for direct use as well as for integration in other AI systems;

‘provider’ means a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body that develops an AI system or a general-purpose AI model or that has an AI system or a general-purpose AI model developed and places it on the market or puts the AI system into service under its own name or trademark, whether for payment or free of charge;

‘operating system’ means a system software that controls the basic functions of the hardware or software and enables software applications to run on it;