The EU AI Act Banned a Short List of AI. Here's What's On It.

Starting next month, the EU AI Act's bans take effect, and the list is shorter than the headlines suggest.

Banned outright: social scoring, AI that manipulates people into harmful decisions, systems that exploit vulnerabilities like age or disability, real-time face recognition in public places, scraping faces off the internet to build databases, guessing emotions at work or in school, and predictive policing based on profiling.

Notice the pattern. Every item on the list treats people as objects to be sorted, tricked, or watched. The law draws one bright line: AI that strips away human dignity doesn't get a risk tier. It gets a ban.

If none of your AI does anything on this list, congratulations. You're already past the scariest part of the Act, and everything after this is just good housekeeping.

I explain frameworks; I don't give legal counsel.