Prohibited AI practices under Article 5

These have been banned since 2 February 2025:

1. Subliminal, manipulative or deceptive techniques that materially distort behaviour and cause significant harm.
2. Exploiting vulnerabilities due to age, disability or social or economic situation.
3. Social scoring that leads to detrimental or unjustified treatment.
4. Predicting criminal offending based solely on profiling or personality traits.
5. Untargeted scraping of facial images to build facial recognition databases.
6. Emotion recognition in workplaces and educational institutions (except for medical or safety reasons).
7. Biometric categorisation to infer race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation.
8. Real-time remote biometric identification in public spaces for law enforcement (narrow exceptions apply).

New via the AI Omnibus: AI practices that generate non-consensual sexual or intimate content, or child sexual abuse material, are banned from 2 December 2026.

Fines: up to €35m or 7% of global annual turnover.

Not legal advice. Last reviewed 26 Oct 2026.