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Restricted AI Categories

The EU AI Act places special requirements on AI systems that fall into these categories. If your AI system fits any of these descriptions, you may need to comply with additional regulations.

1

Face, voice or emotion recognition

Remote face-ID, voice matching, mood-tracking cameras, or grouping people by traits (age, ethnicity, health, etc.).

2

"Life-changing" decisions about people

Hiring, firing, promotions, credit or loan approvals, insurance pricing, social-benefit eligibility, housing allocations.

3

Education assessments & monitoring

Deciding school or university admissions, grading exams, adaptive tutoring that sets marks, AI proctoring for cheating.

4

Medical diagnosis, treatment or health insurance

Tools that help diagnose patients, suggest treatments, triage emergencies, or set health-insurance premiums.

5

Safety-critical control systems

Steering cars, drones, trains or ships; running power grids, water, gas, telecom backbones, factory robots, lifts.

6

Emergency dispatch & triage

AI that classifies 112/999 calls, dispatches police/fire/ambulance, or ranks patients' urgency.

7

Law-enforcement or court support

Predicting crime risk, profiling offenders or victims, analysing evidence, lie-detection, sentencing or legal-research aides.

8

Border control & immigration

Risk-scoring travellers, assessing visa/asylum claims, biometric gates, interview lie-detectors.

9

Election or referendum influence

Targeting voters with personalised messages intended to sway how they vote.

10

Generative AI that users can see or hear

Chatbots, voice assistants, image/video/speech generators, deep-fake filters, AI "virtual influencers."

11

Large general-purpose / foundation models

Any big language or multimodal model you host or release that others can fine-tune for many tasks.

12

Social-scoring & mass profiling

Rating people's "trustworthiness," scraping the web or CCTV to build giant face databases, or predicting crimes from location/behaviour data.

Think your AI system fits these categories?

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Important Note

This list provides general categories for assessment purposes. The actual determination of whether your specific AI system falls under EU AI Act requirements depends on many technical and contextual factors. For specific compliance decisions, consult with qualified legal professionals.