At its core, the EU AI Act is driven by the imperative to safeguard the fundamental rights of EU citizens. The rapid advancement of AI technologies has introduced significant benefits but also potential risks, such as biases in decision-making systems and privacy infringements. The AI Act aims to mitigate these risks by establishing clear rules that ensure AI systems respect the rights enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. This focus on human-centric AI seeks to enhance trust and acceptance among the public, thereby promoting wider adoption of AI technologies in a responsible manner.

Within the EU AI Act, non-discrimination and fairness are incorporated within the following:

• Recital 27 includes seven principles for trustworthy AI including ensuring that AI systems are developed and used in a way that includes diverse actors and promotes equal access, gender equality, and cultural diversity, while avoiding discriminatory impacts and unfair biases that are prohibited by Union or national law.
• Article 10 sets out data and data governance requirements for high-risk AI systems and includes a requirement to examine and assess possible bias in training, validation, and testing data sets.
• Deployers are required to ensure that any input data is relevant and sufficiently representative in view of the intended purpose of the high-risk AI system (Article 26(4)).
• Under Article 4a (introduced by the Digital Omnibus for AI), providers and deployers may exceptionally process special categories of personal data (such as data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, or religious beliefs) where strictly necessary for bias detection and correction. This legal basis is subject to strict safeguards, including pseudonymisation, access controls, deletion once bias correction is complete, and documentation in processing records.
• Article 27 requires deployers of high-risk AI systems (where those deployers are public authorities or private entities providing public services) to conduct fundamental rights impact assessments before putting the system into use (see the High-risk AI section). These assessments must address, among other matters, the specific risks of harm to marginalised persons or vulnerable groups and the foreseeable impact on the categories of natural persons affected. The 19 May 2026 High-Risk Classification Guidelines provide further interpretive guidance on assessing when an AI system poses a significant risk to fundamental rights, including risks of discrimination, and clarify that AI systems used in contexts with heightened discrimination risks (such as employment, credit, and access to essential services) require careful assessment against the criteria in Article 6(3).
• Article 5 prohibits certain AI practices that are inherently discriminatory, including AI systems that categorise natural persons based on biometric data to deduce or infer sensitive information about them (such as race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious beliefs, sex life, or sexual orientation), except where based on lawfully acquired datasets (see the Prohibited activities section).

The Framework Convention addresses the issue of bias (most notably in Articles 10 and 11 relating to ‘equality and non-discrimination') and highlights that AI has the potential to create and reinforce biases and that bias and discrimination by AI can cause manifest harm to individuals and to society. The Framework Convention encourages the development and sharing of strategies to counter these risks, including debiasing datasets in research and development and by the development of rules on data processing. This approach has the potential to turn software, algorithms, and data into an asset in fighting bias and discrimination in certain situations, and a force for equal rights and positive social change.