The EU Parliament on Wednesday approved a regulation called the Artificial Intelligence Act aimed at ensuring the fast-changing technology remains safe and in compliance with fundamental human rights but also boosts innovation. 

The regulation, agreed in negotiations with member states this past December, was endorsed by MEPs with 523 votes in favor, 46 against, and 49 abstentions, according to a press release on the parliament’s website. 

“Europe is NOW a global standard-setter in AI,” Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for the internal market, wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

According to the report, the legislation divides the technology into categories of risk, ranging from “unacceptable” — which would see the certain applications banned — to high, medium, and low hazard.

The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten the rights of citizens, such as biometric categorization systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases. Emotion recognition at workplaces and in schools, social scoring, predictive policing (when it is based solely on profiling a person or assessing their characteristics), and AI that manipulates human behavior or exploits people’s vulnerabilities will also be forbidden.