Which AI practices are banned by the EU AI Act?

Article 5 bans AI that uses subliminal or manipulative techniques to materially distort behaviour and cause significant harm, exploits vulnerabilities due to age, disability or social or economic situation, social scoring that leads to unjustified detrimental treatment, predicting criminality from profiling alone, untargeted scraping of facial images to build recognition databases, emotion recognition in workplaces and schools (except for medical or safety reasons), biometric categorisation to infer sensitive traits such as race or sexual orientation, and real-time remote biometric identification in public spaces for law enforcement except in narrow, authorised cases.

How it works

1. The bans have applied since 2 February 2025.
2. Breaching them carries the highest fines: up to 35 million euros or 7% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.
3. Screen every AI use case against the list before launch, and record that you did.