---
title: "Prohibited practices (Art. 5)"
url: https://euaiactaudit.com/en/duties/prohibited-practices
published: 2026-10-29T14:55:45.202Z
updated: 2026-10-29T14:55:45.202Z
summary: "The AI practices banned by Art. 5 since 2 February 2025, and the prohibitions added from 2 December 2026."
---

# Prohibited practices (Art. 5)

> The AI practices banned by Art. 5 since 2 February 2025, and the prohibitions added from 2 December 2026.

## 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.

## See all dates

The new prohibitions start on 2 December 2026.

## Sources

- [EUR-Lex, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:L_202401689)
- [EUR-Lex, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:L_202601744)
- [AI Act Service Desk, implementation timeline](https://ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu/en/ai-act/timeline/timeline-implementation-eu-ai-act)