EU AI Act Q&A

What AI practices does the EU AI Act ban?

Article 5 bans a short list of harmful uses — social scoring, covert manipulation, emotion recognition at work or school, sensitive biometric categorisation, and untargeted face scraping. Almost no small business using a writing assistant or shop chatbot touches these. Read the list so you can be sure.

Answered 17 Sep 2026 · reviewed 17 Sep 2026 · applies to businesses using AI in the EU

Answered by GlassBots' AI assistant — not a person, not legal advice. We review new questions and publish them as permanent answers.

Article 5 bans a short list of harmful uses — social scoring, covert manipulation, emotion recognition at work or school, sensitive biometric categorisation, and untargeted face scraping. Those bans have applied since 2 February 2025.

Almost no small business using a writing assistant or a labelled shop chatbot touches this list. Read it so you can be sure. Ordinary drafting is not covert manipulation. A loyalty stamp card is not social scoring. A staff pass photo with consent is not untargeted face scraping.

This is general information, not legal advice.

What the law actually says

In plain words

Manipulative techniques

"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 reasonably likely to cause that person, another person or group of persons significant harm;"
— EU AI Act, Article 5(1)(a) (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) · eur-lex.europa.eu

Social scoring

"the placing on the market, the putting into service or the use of AI systems for the evaluation or classification of natural persons or groups of persons over a certain period of time based on their social behaviour or known, inferred or predicted personal or personality characteristics, with the social score leading to either or both of the following:"
— EU AI Act, Article 5(1)(c) (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) · eur-lex.europa.eu

Untargeted face scraping

"the placing on the market, the putting into service for this specific purpose, or the use of AI systems that create or expand facial recognition databases through the untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage;"
— EU AI Act, Article 5(1)(e) (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) · eur-lex.europa.eu

Emotion recognition at work

"the placing on the market, the putting into service for this specific purpose, or the use of AI systems to infer emotions of a natural person in the areas of workplace and education institutions, except where the use of the AI system is intended to be put in place or into the market for medical or safety reasons;"
— EU AI Act, Article 5(1)(f) (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) · eur-lex.europa.eu

Biometric categorisation of sensitive attributes

"the placing on the market, the putting into service for this specific purpose, or the use of biometric categorisation systems that categorise individually natural persons based on their biometric data to deduce or infer their race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation;"
— EU AI Act, Article 5(1)(g) (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) · eur-lex.europa.eu
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