AI Incidents
Real-world cases where AI systems caused harm, classified by risk domain and entity. Data sourced from 
AIID and classified by 
MIT AI Risk Initiative. CC BY-SA 4.0
682 incidents
Wikipedia Vandalism Prevention Bot Loop
Wikipedia bots meant to remove vandalism clash with each other and form feedback loops of repetitve undoing of the other bot's edits.
Honda's CMBS False Positives Allegedly Caused Accidents to Customers
Honda's Collision Mitigation Braking System (CMBS) allegedly caused accidents to consumers due to frequent instances of false obstacle detection.
PimEyes's Facial Recognition AI Allegedly Lacked Safeguards to Prevent Itself from Being Abused
PimEyes offered its subscription-based AI service to anyone in the public to search for matching facial images across the internet, which critics said lacked public oversight and government rules to prevent itself from misuse such as stalking women.
Alexa Plays Pornography Instead of Kids Song
An Amazon Echo Dot using the Amazon Alex software started to play pornographic results when a child asked it to play a song.
Reinforcement Learning Reward Functions in Video Games
OpenAI published a post about its findings when using Universe, a software for measuring and training AI agents to conduct reinforcement learning experiments, showing that the AI agent did not act in the way intended to complete a videogame.
“Amazon’s Choice” Algorithm Failed to Recommend Functional Products and Prone to Review Manipulation
Amazon’s “Amazon’s Choice” algorithm recommended poor-quality defective products and were reportedly susceptible to manipulation by inauthentic reviews.
Passport checker Detects Asian man's Eyes as Closed
New Zealand passport robot reader rejects the application of an applicant with Asian descent and says his eyes are closed.
Poor Performance of Tesla Factory Robots
The goal of manufacturing 2,500 Tesla Model 3's per week was falling short by 500 cars/week, and employees had to be "borrowed" from Panasonic in a shared factory to help hand-assemble lithium batteries for Tesla.
Tesla FSD Reportedly Increased Crash Risk, Prompting Recall
A component of Tesla Full Self Driving system was deemed by regulators to increase crash risk such as by exceeding speed limits or by traveling through intersections unlawfully or unpredictably, prompting recall for hundreds of thousands of vehicles.
LinkedIn Search Prefers Male Names
An investigation by The Seattle Times in 2016 found a gender bias in LinkedIn's search engine.
AI Beauty Judge Did Not Like Dark Skin
In 2016, after artificial inntelligence software Beauty.AI judged an international beauty contest and declared a majority of winners to be white, researchers found that Beauty.AI was racially biased in determining beauty.
Amazon's Experimental Hiring Tool Allegedly Displayed Gender Bias in Candidate Rankings
Between 2014 and 2017, Amazon reportedly developed an AI-powered recruiting tool to score job applicants, trained on a decade of resumes purportedly drawn largely from men. Media reports say the system learned to favor male candidates, penalizing terms like "women's" and graduates from certain all-women's colleges. Efforts to remove these biases reportedly did not guarantee fairness, and the project was ultimately abandoned. Amazon reportedly states recruiters never solely relied on the tool.
Common Biases of Vector Embeddings
Researchers from Boston University and Microsoft Research, New England demonstrated gender bias in the most common techniques used to embed words for natural language processing (NLP).
Security Robot Rolls Over Child in Mall
On July 7, 2016, a Knightscope K5 autonomous security robot collided with a 16-month old boy while patrolling the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, CA.
Tesla on AutoPilot Killed Driver in Crash in Florida while Watching Movie
A Tesla Model S on autopilot crashed into a white articulated tractor-trailer on Highway US 27A in Williston, Florida, killing the driver.