EU AI Act Article 5: prohibited AI practices — a plain list for small businesses

Last updated 14 Oct 2026 · European Union

Short answer. From 2 February 2025, Article 5 of the EU AI Act prohibits certain AI practices in the Union — including harmful manipulative or deceptive techniques, exploiting vulnerabilities (age, disability, social/economic situation), social scoring that leads to unfair treatment, untargeted scraping of faces to build recognition databases, emotion inference in workplaces and schools (with narrow exceptions), some biometric categorisation, and most real-time remote biometric identification in public spaces for law enforcement (Article 5 text; timeline on the Commission AI Act page). Additional bans on certain intimate-image and child-abuse material generation/manipulation apply from 2 December 2026. If your SME only uses ordinary productivity chatbots, you are usually outside these bans — but you must still not deploy any of the listed practices.

Plain list (SME-relevant)

Art. 5 idea	In plain words — do not…
(a) Manipulative / deceptive techniques	Use AI that subliminally or deceptively pushes people into decisions that cause significant harm
(b) Exploitation of vulnerabilities	Target people because of age, disability or a difficult social/economic situation to distort behaviour and cause significant harm
(c) Social scoring	Score people over time on behaviour/personality and then treat them unfairly in unrelated or disproportionate ways
(d) Crime-risk prediction from profiling alone	Predict that someone will commit a crime solely from profiling or personality traits (human-supported investigation on hard facts is treated differently)
(e) Untargeted face scraping	Build or grow a facial-recognition database by scraping faces from the internet or CCTV without targeting
(f) Emotion inference at work / school	Infer emotions in workplaces or education institutions, except for medical or safety reasons as the article allows
(g) Sensitive biometric categorisation	Use biometrics to infer race, politics, religion, union membership, sex life or sexual orientation (with limited labelling exceptions)
(h) Real-time remote biometrics in public (law enforcement)	Most live public facial identification for policing — only narrow, authorised cases
(ba)/(bb) from 2 Dec 2026	Certain AI that generates/manipulates intimate deepfakes or child sexual abuse material — see the article text for the exact scope

What this means for a normal SME

Do not buy or build tools that score staff or customers in the banned ways.
Do not turn on emotion-detection on workplace cameras or school tools.
Do not scrape LinkedIn/Instagram faces into a recognition database.
Ordinary spam filters, accounting bots and documented chatbots are a different part of the Act (transparency / literacy) — see our Article 4 and Article 50 guides.

Checklist

List every AI tool in use (including free ones)
Flag any emotion, biometric, scraping or social-scoring feature
Switch those features off or replace the tool
Keep a one-page note of what you checked (date + owner)

Frequently asked questions

When did Article 5 prohibitions start?

Most Article 5 prohibitions apply from 2 February 2025. Some deepfake-related prohibitions in points (ba) and (bb) apply from 2 December 2026.

Does Article 5 ban ChatGPT for office use?

Not as such. It bans specific harmful practices listed in Article 5. Ordinary productivity use is governed by other duties (for example AI literacy under Article 4).

Can we use emotion recognition on shop CCTV?

Emotion inference in workplaces is prohibited except where the system is for medical or safety reasons as Article 5(f) allows. Get legal advice before any biometric or emotion feature.

Where is the official text?

EUR-Lex hosts Regulation (EU) 2024/1689; a consolidated Article 5 HTML is available at artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/5/, and the Commission summarises the timeline on its AI Act page.

Official sources

Not legal advice. A free plain-language map of Article 5; the Act is amended over time — check the Commission pages or a lawyer before you rely on it. Last checked 14 Oct 2026.

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