Prohibited AI Practices Under Article 5 of the EU AI Act: Scope, Enforcement, and Compliance Methodology

Article 5 of the EU AI Act establishes absolute prohibitions on eight categories of AI practice that are incompatible with human dignity, autonomy, and fundamental rights regardless of safeguards applied. The eight prohibitions in Article 5(1)(a)-(h) cover subliminal or manipulative techniques, exploitation of vulnerabilities, social scoring, individual criminal risk assessment based solely on profiling, untargeted scraping of facial images to build facial recognition databases, emotion recognition in the workplace and educational institutions, biometric categorisation for sensitive characteristics, and real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement. The prohibitions applied from 2 February 2025, making them the earliest-applied EU AI Act obligations; penalties under Article 99(3) became enforceable from 2 August 2025 at up to EUR 35 million or 7 per cent of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.

This paper analyses each of the eight prohibitions in depth, examining the precise statutory elements, the available exceptions, and the boundary cases requiring careful legal analysis. It examines the European Commission's February 2025 Guidelines on Prohibited AI Practices, the extraterritorial reach through Article 2, and two boundary case analyses covering conversational AI emotional dependency and HR personality assessment AI. A prohibited practices screening methodology is presented for use as the first stage of the classification process.