Article 5 EU AI Act: prohibited AI practices — compliance screen for product and legal

Article 5 and Title II of the EU AI Act define prohibited AI practices — uses considered incompatible with EU values. Unlike high-risk systems, these are not solved with extra paperwork: the deployment itself must change. Product and legal reviews should include a fast Article 5 screen on every feature that touches biometrics, emotion, scoring, or manipulation.

Themes teams must keyword in design reviews

• Subliminal or manipulative techniques that materially distort behaviour causing harm.
• Exploitation of vulnerabilities (age, disability, social situation) — specific conditions in Article 5.
• Social scoring by public authorities — evaluation or classification leading to detrimental treatment in unrelated contexts.
• Certain remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement — narrow exceptions and conditions.
• Untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV to build databases.
• Emotion inference in workplaces and schools — subject to limited exceptions (safety, medical).

Design and procurement guardrails

Map user journeys, not only model classes: a “harmless” classifier can become problematic when combined with automated decisions affecting workers or students. Vendor contracts should reference compliance with applicable EU AI Act prohibitions for the agreed use case.

Not legal advice

Definitions in Article 5 are legal tests. Always involve qualified counsel for borderline cases; use this article and Agent Mai outputs as structured input to that review, not a substitute for it.