Article 5 establishes the prohibited practices tier -- AI systems or AI uses that are banned outright across the EU regardless of the purpose or context of the deployer. These prohibitions reflect the EU legislator's judgment that certain AI capabilities or applications are incompatible with fundamental rights and EU values.
The Eight Prohibited Practices
Article 5(1) prohibits: (a) subliminal, manipulative, or deceptive AI that distorts behaviour causing harm; (b) AI exploiting vulnerabilities linked to age, disability, or social/economic situation causing harm; (c) social scoring by public authorities leading to detrimental treatment; (d) individual criminal-risk assessment based solely or primarily on profiling or personality traits; (e) untargeted facial-image scraping from the internet or CCTV to create or expand facial-recognition databases; (f) emotion inference in workplace or educational settings except for medical or safety reasons; (g) biometric categorisation inferring sensitive protected characteristics; and (h) real-time remote biometric identification (RTBRI) in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement, subject only to narrow statutory conditions.
The Law Enforcement Exception for Real-Time Biometrics
Article 5(1)(h) contains the most complex prohibition: real-time remote biometric identification (RTBRI) in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement. Article 5(2) creates an exhaustive list of permitted objectives: targeted searches for specific victims of crime or missing persons, prevention of specific and imminent threats to life or terrorist attacks, and localisation of suspects of serious offences listed in Annex II. Use requires judicial or independent administrative authorisation, with urgent retrospective authorisation handled under the Article 5 conditions.
Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 — Article 5(1)(a)
“The placing on the market, the putting into service or the use of an AI system that deploys subliminal techniques beyond a person's consciousness or purposefully manipulative or deceptive techniques, with the objective, or the effect, of materially distorting the behaviour of a person or a group of persons by appreciably impairing their ability to make an informed decision, thereby causing them to take a decision that they would not have otherwise taken in a manner that causes or is likely to cause significant harm to that person, another person or group of persons.”
- Article 5(1)(c): social scoring prohibition applies to public authorities, not private entities
- Article 5(1)(d): criminal profiling prohibition covers both predictive policing and risk assessment tools
- Article 5(1)(g): biometric categorisation prohibition covers inference of sensitive characteristics from biometric data
- Article 5(1)(f): emotion recognition prohibition in workplaces and educational institutions covers all sectors, not only high-risk ones
- Violations of Article 5 attract the highest fine tier: 35 million EUR or 7% of global turnover