AI Risk Assessment ToolEU AI Act prohibited AI practices (Article 5)
Some uses of AI are banned outright in the EU. If any of these describe your system, the use has to stop; it can't be fixed with documentation.
Screening questions
- Does it use subliminal, manipulative or deceptive techniques that materially distort people's behaviour in a way likely to cause significant harm?
- Does it exploit vulnerabilities due to age, disability or a social or economic situation to distort behaviour in a harmful way?
- Does it score or classify people based on social behaviour or personal traits, leading to unjustified or disproportionate detrimental treatment (social scoring)?
- Does it predict the risk that a person will commit a crime based solely on profiling or personality traits?
- Does it build or expand facial recognition databases by untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV?
- Does it infer emotions of people in the workplace or in education (other than for medical or safety reasons)?
- Does it categorise people by biometric data to infer race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation?
- Is it used for real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement?
- Can it generate non-consensual sexually explicit images of real people or child sexual abuse material (prohibition added by the Digital Omnibus)?
If this applies
At least one answer matches a practice banned by Article 5 since 2 February 2025. Stop using the system for this purpose and get legal advice.
Screen your AI system free (24 questions)
The AI Governance Toolkit Professional ($599) has the EU AI Act risk assessment workbook for each system, plus the AI policy and risk register, ISO/IEC 42001 gap assessment and NIST AI RMF mapping.
Other parts of the EU AI Act
- high-risk AI systems (Annex III)
- high-risk AI in regulated products (Annex I)
- transparency obligations (Article 50)
- general-purpose AI (GPAI) models
- Timeline: when each obligation applies
EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) as amended by the Digital Omnibus on AI (in force 27 July 2026). Screening questions are our own summary, not legal text. This is a screening aid, not legal advice.