AI Stuttgart

Cyber Valley launched on 15 December 2016, when Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann and the partners signed a letter of intent. The research partners are the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, together with the state of Baden-Württemberg; the industry partners are Amazon, BMW, IAV, Mercedes-Benz Group, Porsche, Bosch and ZF. The partners put 165 million euros into the start. Cyber Valley set up ten research groups, ten professorships in AI and machine learning and the graduate school IMPRS-IS with more than 100 doctoral students.

A public advisory board reviews the ethical and social effects of research projects before they are approved. According to the state science ministry (in German), Cyber Valley GmbH has coordinated the network since late 2021, the Tübingen AI Center opened in July 2022 as a national AI competence center, and the first ELLIS institute in the world started in Tübingen in 2023 with 100 million euros from the Hector Foundation over ten years.

The University of Stuttgart founded its Institute for Artificial Intelligence (in German) on 14 July 2023. The Institute for Artificial Intelligence works on AI for simulations and on intelligent robotics, with research groups on analytic computing, autonomous systems, machine learning in simulation sciences and autonomous sensing and perception. The institute is linked to Cyber Valley, the SimTech cluster of excellence, the ELLIS network and IRIS, the university's forum for reflecting on intelligent systems.

Stuttgart Financial (in German) counts 29 insurers, 17 banks and two building societies in the city, and 11,250 people work in insurance there. The EU AI Act lists two finance uses in its Annex III as high-risk: AI that evaluates the creditworthiness of natural persons or sets their credit score, with an exception for fraud detection, and AI for risk assessment and pricing of life and health insurance for natural persons. A Stuttgart insurer that prices life or health policies with a model, or a bank or building society that scores loan applicants with one, falls under these rules.

For high-risk systems the AI Act requires a risk management system, data governance, technical documentation, logging, human oversight and accuracy and cybersecurity checks. BaFin supervises the AI that banks and insurers use in regulated business; the EU AI Act in finance and AI in insurance pages go into detail.

Finance Loop started in Frankfurt and holds events in Munich, Berlin and Hamburg as well; it has not held an event in Stuttgart so far. The AI format from Finance Loop is Claude Hacker House, a hands-on series for finance and tech professionals who already work with AI, and in Frankfurt it presented an official side event of AI Week Frankfurt 2025 with Frankfurt Main Finance and AI Hub Frankfurt. People from Stuttgart's insurers, banks and AI teams meet others from their field at these events and in the member network across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Cyber Valley is a research cooperation on AI in the Stuttgart and Tübingen region, started in 2016 by the state of Baden-Württemberg, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen and industry partners. Cyber Valley works on machine learning, computer vision and robotics and supports startups that come out of its research.

The Institute for Artificial Intelligence was founded in July 2023 and works on AI for simulations and intelligent robotics, with two research groups belonging to Cyber Valley.

AI used for risk assessment and pricing for natural persons in life and health insurance is classified as high-risk. On the banking side, credit scoring of natural persons is high-risk, while AI used only to detect financial fraud is outside that category.