Rules / EU AI Act / Article 5(1)(b)
Article 5(1)(b), EU AI Act (European Union)
Do not place on the market, put into service or use AI that exploits vulnerabilities due to age, disability or social or economic situation to materially distort behaviour in a way that causes, or is likely to cause, significant harm.
WTA-R-EU-0001-003 Permanent ID
Scope
Applies whether the distortion is the objective or the effect of the system.
Dates. Applies from 2 Feb 2025 (Art. 113(a): Chapters I and II). The Digital Omnibus on AI (Reg. (EU) 2026/1744) did not change this date.
Penalty. Up to EUR 35m or 7% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher (Art. 99(3)); for SMEs, whichever is lower (Art. 99(6)).
History
- Duty changed from …behaviour, causing or likely causing… to …behaviour in a way that causes, or is likely to cause,…
Cite this obligation
WTA-R-EU-0001-003: Article 5(1)(b), Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act). wheresthe.ai, https://wheresthe.ai/id/WTA-R-EU-0001-003/ (checked 8 Oct 2026).
Other obligations under EU AI Act
Take measures to support the AI literacy of staff and other people operating or using AI systems on your behalf, considering their knowledge, experience, training and the context of use.
Do not place on the market, put into service or use AI that deploys subliminal, manipulative or deceptive techniques that materially distort behaviour and cause, or are reasonably likely to cause, significant harm.
Do not place on the market, put into service or use AI for social scoring that leads to detrimental treatment in unrelated social contexts or treatment unjustified or disproportionate to the behaviour.
Do not place on the market, put into service or use AI to assess or predict the risk of a person committing a crime based solely on profiling or on personality traits and characteristics.
Do not place on the market, put into service or use AI that creates or expands facial recognition databases through untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage.
Do not place on the market, put into service or use AI to infer the emotions of people in workplaces or education institutions, except for medical or safety reasons.
Do not place on the market, put into service or use biometric categorisation systems that infer a person's race, political opinions, union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation.
Do not use real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement, except where strictly necessary for a listed objective and with prior judicial or independent authorisation.
Document your assessment before placing on the market an Annex III system you consider not high-risk, and give that documentation to national competent authorities on request.
Establish, implement, document and maintain a risk management system that runs through the high-risk system's lifecycle to identify, evaluate and mitigate risks to health, safety and fundamental rights.
Use training, validation and testing data sets that follow documented data governance practices and are relevant, sufficiently representative and, as far as possible, free of errors and complete.
Examine data sets for biases likely to harm health, safety or fundamental rights or cause unlawful discrimination, and take measures to detect, prevent and mitigate them.