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

• EU AI Act
• European Union

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)