← Concept Index

Law, standards & governance

Prohibited AI practices

Also called: banned uses, unacceptable risk

DEFINITION

The AI Act bans a small set of uses judged to pose unacceptable risk — including certain manipulative or exploitative systems, untargeted scraping of faces to build recognition databases, and some social-scoring and biometric-categorisation uses.

WHY IT MATTERS

These aren't 'do it carefully' — they're off the table. Knowing the banned list keeps a well-meaning project from designing something that can't be deployed in the EU at all.

COMMONLY CONFUSED WITH

High-risk uses. High-risk is allowed with strict duties; prohibited practices are not allowed. The exact scope is legal detail — confirm against the current text, not a summary.

SOURCES

First-pass citations, limited to primary sources; a reviewer will broaden and verify these before this entry leaves draft.