EU AI Act Prohibited Practices and AI Literacy Duties Now Apply

On 4 February 2025 the European Commission published guidelines explaining the prohibited practices, with legal explanations and practical examples. The Commission states that the guidelines are not binding and that authoritative interpretation is reserved for the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Which practices are banned

Article 5 prohibits placing on the market, putting into service or using AI systems for a defined list of purposes, including:

• subliminal, manipulative or deceptive techniques that materially distort behaviour and cause significant harm;
• exploiting vulnerabilities linked to age, disability or social or economic situation;
• social scoring that leads to detrimental or unfavourable treatment;
• assessing the risk of a person committing a crime based solely on profiling or personality traits;
• untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV to build facial recognition databases;
• emotion recognition in workplaces and educational institutions, except for medical or safety reasons;
• biometric categorisation to infer sensitive characteristics such as race, political opinions or sexual orientation;
• real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement, subject to narrow exceptions.

The AI literacy duty

Article 4 requires providers and deployers of AI systems to take measures to ensure, to their best extent, a sufficient level of AI literacy among staff and others operating or using AI systems on their behalf, taking into account their technical knowledge, experience, education and training and the context of use. This applies to any organisation using AI in the EU, not only developers.

Enforcement and what comes next

Under Article 99, breaches of the Article 5 prohibitions can attract administrative fines of up to EUR 35 million or 7% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. The penalty provisions apply from 2 August 2025, the same date on which the obligations for general-purpose AI models and the governance provisions begin to apply. Most remaining obligations, including those for high-risk systems listed in Annex III, apply from 2 August 2026. Businesses should by now have checked their AI use cases against Article 5 and put AI literacy measures in place.

Sources

• EUR-Lex: Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act)
• European Commission: Guidelines on prohibited artificial intelligence practices (4 February 2025)