Prohibited AI Practices
Prohibited AI practices are the EU AI Act's unacceptable-risk category: AI practices that cannot be placed on the market, put into service, or used in the covered EU contexts.
Key points
- Article 5 prohibits AI systems that use subliminal, manipulative, or deceptive techniques to materially distort behaviour in ways that cause or are reasonably likely to cause significant harm [src-085].
- It also prohibits systems that exploit vulnerabilities linked to age, disability, or social/economic situation when that exploitation materially distorts behaviour and risks significant harm [src-085].
- Social scoring of natural persons or groups is prohibited where it leads to detrimental or unfavourable treatment in unrelated contexts, or treatment disproportionate to the relevant behaviour [src-085].
- Criminal-offence risk assessment based solely on profiling or personality traits is prohibited, while AI may support human assessment grounded in objective and verifiable facts linked to criminal activity [src-085].
- Untargeted scraping of facial images to create or expand facial-recognition databases is prohibited [src-085].
- Emotion recognition in workplaces and education is prohibited except for medical or safety reasons, and biometric categorisation to infer sensitive characteristics is prohibited subject to specific limits [src-085].
- Real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement is prohibited except for narrow, authorised, serious public-interest situations [src-085].
Related entities
Related concepts
- Risk-Based AI Regulation
- High-Risk AI Systems
- Agent Security Boundaries
- High-Stakes AI Guidance
- Responsibility as Human Work
Source references
- [src-085] European Parliament and Council of the European Union – "Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 … (Artificial Intelligence Act)" (2024-07-12)