Application of General Provisions, Prohibited Practices and AI Literacy

The first substantive phases of the Artificial Intelligence Regulation came into effect on 2 February 2025.

Scope of application

The provisions entering into force include, in particular:

AI literacy

Entities covered by the Regulation must ensure that their staff and users have the necessary skills and knowledge to use AI systems appropriately, depending on the context in which those systems are applied.

Prohibited practices

Certain uses of AI systems that are incompatible with the fundamental rights of the European Union are now prohibited. These include:

• Subliminal manipulation techniques that affect behaviour;
• Exploiting the vulnerabilities of specific groups;
• Social scoring systems;
• Assessing or predicting the risk of a person committing criminal offences based solely on profiling or personal characteristics;
• Creating or expanding facial recognition databases through the untargeted mass scraping of facial images;
• Inferring the emotions of natural persons in the workplace or in educational settings, except in cases defined by the Regulation;
• Biometric categorisation intended to infer sensitive attributes, such as racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, sexual orientation or trade union membership;
• Using real-time remote biometric identification systems in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement purposes, except in cases defined by the Regulation;
• Using post-remote biometric identification systems in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement purposes, except in cases defined by the Regulation.