The agreement prohibits using Microsoft AI services for autonomous consequential decision-making without human oversight, social scoring, biometric categorization to infer protected characteristics, facial recognition database creation via scraping, emotional inference from physical or behavioral characteristics, and deceptive or manipulative content generation. These restrictions apply to AI services that operate autonomously or with varying levels of human intervention.
This analysis describes what Microsoft's agreement states, permits, or reserves. It does not constitute a legal determination about enforceability. Regulatory applicability and practical outcomes may vary by jurisdiction, enforcement context, and individual circumstances. Read our methodology
These restrictions directly align with categories of prohibited AI practices under the EU AI Act and reflect operationally significant limitations on permissible use cases for Microsoft AI services across the covered service portfolio. Organizations deploying Microsoft AI services in HR, financial services, law enforcement, or marketing contexts should assess their use cases against these specific prohibitions.
⚠ Use of AI services in prohibited categories may result in account enforcement actions including limitation or closure as stated in Section 4.b.iv
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Compare across platforms →"You agree that you will not use the AI services, including those that make decisions, or take actions, autonomously or with varying levels of human intervention: 1. To make decisions or take actions without appropriate human oversight that may have a consequential impact on any person's legal position, financial position, life opportunities, employment opportunities, or human rights, or may result in physical or psychological harm to a person or group of persons; 2. To deceive or intentionally misinform (e.g., false advertising), or deploy subliminal techniques (e.g., visual, auditory, or other signals beyond a normal person's range of perception) with the intent to manipulate or distort the behavior of a person in a way that causes harm; ... 4. For social scoring or predictive profiling that would lead to discriminatory, unfair, biased, detrimental, unfavorable, or harmful treatment of certain persons or groups of persons; ... 6. Based on their biometric data, to categorize people or to deduce or infer their race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, or sex life or sexual orientation...; 7. To create or expand facial recognition databases through the untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage; ... 9. To attempt to infer people's emotional states from their physical, physiological, or behavioral characteristics.Excerpt from Microsoft's Services Agreement (Legacy)
(1) REGULATORY LANDSCAPE: The enumerated prohibitions in Section 14.s.ix directly engage the EU AI Act's prohibited practices provisions, including prohibitions on social scoring, biometric categorization to infer special category data, real-time remote biometric identification, and …
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These restrictions directly align with categories of prohibited AI practices under the EU AI Act and reflect operationally significant limitations on permissible use cases for Microsoft AI services across the covered service portfolio. Organizations deploying Microsoft AI services in HR, financial services, law enforcement, or marketing contexts should assess their use cases against these specific prohibitions.
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