EU AI Act
Article 5: prohibited AI practices
The AI Act's outright bans. Eight categories of AI use that are not allowed in the EU regardless of safeguards or consent.
What it covers
Article 5 prohibits the following practices when an AI system is placed on the market, put into service, or used in the Union:
- Subliminal or purposefully manipulative techniques that materially distort a person's behaviour and cause significant harm.
- Exploitation of vulnerabilities tied to age, disability, or socio-economic situation, where the practice causes significant harm.
- Social scoring of natural persons by public or private actors, where the score leads to detrimental treatment unrelated to the original context.
- Predictive policing assessments based solely on profiling or personality traits.
- Untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV to build face-recognition databases.
- Emotion recognition in workplaces and educational institutions, except for medical or safety reasons.
- Biometric categorisation that infers race, political opinions, trade-union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, or sexual orientation.
- Real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces by law enforcement, except in narrowly defined emergency cases (kidnapping, terrorism, locating specific suspects of serious crimes).
When it applies
Applicable since 2 February 2025. Operators are expected to remove non-compliant systems from the market on that date.
Penalty exposure
The most severe tier. Up to €35M or 7% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher (Article 99).