Article 5 — Prohibited AI practices (EU AI Act)

Article 5 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 — Prohibited AI practices. Official text, practical interpretation, key obligations and compliance implications.

Official Text Summary

Article 5 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (the EU AI Act) constitutes the entirety of Title II and establishes an absolute list of AI practices that are prohibited across the European Union. The prohibitions target AI systems whose potential for harm is deemed so severe that no risk-management measure or conformity assessment can render them acceptable.

The article bans: (1) AI systems that deploy subliminal techniques beyond a person's consciousness or deliberately exploit psychological weaknesses or vulnerabilities to materially distort behaviour in a way that causes or is likely to cause significant harm; (2) AI systems that exploit age, disability, or socioeconomic circumstances to distort behaviour harmfully; (3) AI systems used by public authorities or on their behalf for social scoring — evaluating or classifying natural persons based on social behaviour or inferred personal characteristics — when this leads to detrimental or unfavourable treatment; (4) AI systems assessing the risk of an individual committing a criminal offence solely on the basis of profiling or personality traits; (5) real-time remote biometric identification of natural persons in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement purposes, subject to limited and strictly controlled exceptions; (6) real-time or post remote biometric systems used to infer sensitive attributes such as race, political opinion, trade-union membership, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation; (7) AI systems that create or expand facial recognition databases through untargeted scraping of the internet or CCTV footage; and (8) AI systems that infer emotions of natural persons in workplace and educational settings, except for safety reasons.

What This Means in Practice

Article 5 draws a hard compliance line that affects every organisation developing, deploying, or importing AI systems into the EU market, regardless of size or sector.

For technology providers and AI developers, the prohibitions mean that certain product categories simply cannot be lawfully placed on the EU market. A vendor marketing a workforce productivity tool that includes emotion recognition to monitor employee engagement — flagging stressed or disengaged workers to managers — must remove or redesign that feature before 2 February 2025. Similarly, a retail analytics startup whose system infers customer mood from facial expressions in-store falls within the prohibition on emotion inference in non-safety contexts.

For organisations using third-party AI tools, due diligence is equally mandatory. A human-resources department that deploys a recruitment platform performing covert psychographic profiling to screen candidates risks joint liability as a deployer.

For public authorities, the social-scoring prohibition is particularly significant. Any AI system that aggregates behavioural data — payment history, mobility patterns, online activity — to produce a citizen score that then restricts access to public services or benefits is unlawful, regardless of whether the system is technically sophisticated.

For law enforcement bodies, the narrow exception to the real-time biometric identification ban demands robust prior-authorisation procedures, geographic and temporal limits, mandatory logging, and post-hoc reporting to national supervisory authorities. Ad hoc or continuous deployment without prior judicial or administrative sign-off is unlawful even within the exception's scope.

Organisations should conduct an inventory of all AI systems in use or under development, map each against the Article 5 criteria, and cease prohibited operations without delay.

Key Obligations

• Cease or never deploy any AI system that uses subliminal, manipulative, or vulnerability-exploiting techniques to distort human behaviour in ways likely to cause significant harm, with no exception or proportionality balancing available.
• Prohibit social scoring by public authorities or entities acting on their behalf: do not use AI to evaluate or classify natural persons for social behaviour or inferred personality traits when the outcome leads to detrimental or discriminatory treatment.
• Decommission predictive policing tools that assess individual criminal risk based solely on profiling, personality traits, or past association without concrete behavioural evidence.
• Refrain from scraping biometric data from the internet, CCTV, or other sources to create or expand facial recognition databases; existing databases built through such means must not be used.
• Do not deploy AI systems that infer sensitive personal attributes — racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, trade-union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation — from biometric or behavioural data.
• Apply strict prior-authorisation and logging controls if operating as law enforcement and relying on the narrow Article 5(2)–(5) exception for real-time remote biometric identification; each deployment must be time-limited, geographically scoped, and subject to ex-post reporting.

Relationship to Other Articles

Article 5 must be read as the apex of the EU AI Act's risk-based hierarchy. It operates in conjunction with the definitions in Article 3, which establishes what constitutes an "AI system", a "provider", and a "deployer" — the actors subject to the prohibitions. The distinction between prohibited practices under Article 5 and high-risk AI systems under Article 6 and Annex III is fundamental: prohibited systems cannot be lawfully used at all, whereas high-risk systems may be deployed subject to conformity assessments, registration, and ongoing monitoring obligations.

Article 9 (risk-management systems) and Articles 10–15 (data governance, transparency, human oversight) apply downstream to permitted high-risk systems but have no remedial role for Article 5 prohibitions. Article 99 establishes the penalty structure, including the top-tier fine applicable to Article 5 breaches. Article 85 and the provisions on market surveillance (Articles 74–78) govern enforcement. National competent authorities designated under Article 70 are responsible for monitoring compliance with the prohibitions at Member State level.

Compliance Timeline

• 1 August 2024 — Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 entered into force, twenty days after publication in the Official Journal of the European Union.
• 2 February 2025 — Article 5 prohibitions became directly applicable across all EU Member States. This was the first substantive application date under the phased schedule set out in Article 113. From this date, any deployment, placing on the market, or putting into service of a prohibited AI system constitutes a regulatory violation subject to penalties under Article 99.
• 2 August 2025 — Rules on general-purpose AI models (Title VIII, Articles 51–56) became applicable.
• 2 August 2026 — Obligations for most high-risk AI systems listed in Annex III apply, along with governance and market-surveillance provisions.
• 2 August 2027 — Extended deadline for high-risk AI systems already on the market before August 2024 that fall under Annex I (safety component in regulated products).

For Article 5 specifically, there is no grace period or transitional arrangement: the deadline was 2 February 2025, and compliance is now overdue for any organisation that has not yet acted.