Prohibited practices (Art. 5)

#Banned since 2 February 2025

Art. 5(1) bans placing on the market, putting into service or using AI systems for these practices:

• (a) subliminal, manipulative or deceptive techniques that distort behaviour and cause or are likely to cause significant harm;
• (b) exploiting the vulnerabilities of people due to age, disability or a specific social or economic situation, with significant harm;
• (c) social scoring that leads to detrimental or unfavourable treatment;
• (d) assessing the risk that a person commits a crime based solely on profiling or personality traits;
• (e) building facial recognition databases by untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV;
• (f) inferring emotions in the workplace or in education, except for medical or safety reasons;
• (g) biometric categorisation that infers sensitive characteristics such as race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation;
• (h) real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement, except in narrow cases the article lists.

#New from 2 December 2026

Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 adds prohibitions in Art. 5(1)(ba) and (bb), (1a) and (1b). The Commission describes them as covering AI systems that generate non-consensual sexual deepfakes and child sexual abuse material.

#What a deployer checks

• Do any of the AI tools in your inventory do one of the things above?
• Does a tool infer emotions of employees or students?
• Does a tool generate images or video of real people, and can it produce intimate content without consent?

The prohibitions sit in the highest fine tier of Art. 99.