Prohibited practices: AI obligations

Practical requirements extracted from policy instruments, with the source article, the actors they bind, evidence examples and original framework mappings. Legal requirements are marked; everything else is voluntary guidance.

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Legal requirement Prohibited practices European Union

Do not deploy or provide AI for prohibited practices

EU AI Act · Article 5

Article 5 bans placing on the market, putting into service or using AI for listed practices, including subliminal or manipulative techniques that cause significant harm, exploitation of vulnerabilities, social scoring by public or private actors leading to detrimental treatment, untargeted scraping of facial images to build recognition databases, emotion recognition in workplaces and education institutions except for medical or safety reasons, biometric categorisation to infer protected characteristics, and real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement outside narrow exceptions.

Pending review Applies from 2 Feb 2025

Frequently asked questions

What is an obligation on this site?

A single practical requirement pulled out of an instrument and stated on its own: keep a risk management system, log incidents, document training data, provide human oversight, and so on. Each one cites the article or section it comes from so you can check it against the source.

Does a voluntary obligation have legal force?

No, and every obligation is labelled either a legal requirement or voluntary guidance. Voluntary items still matter in practice, because procurement questionnaires and auditors ask about them, but only the binding ones carry legal consequence.

How do I find the obligations that apply to my organisation?

Filter by jurisdiction, category, actor, sector or use case. The applicability check asks a short set of questions and returns the duties that may reach you. It is an educational screen, not a legal determination, and it says so.

Why do some instruments have no obligations listed?

Because nobody has broken them out yet. Most instruments are recorded at summary level first; obligations are added jurisdiction by jurisdiction. The coverage and open-gaps pages publish exactly what is missing rather than hiding it.