Values Statement: We believe AI should cause no harm, but enhance the quality of human life, by proactively adopting our AI Governance framework.

Evidence-based Transparent For governance

AI Incidents

TAIM catalog Map Data source & citation Failure Files™

Amazon Alexa Plays Loud Music when Owner is Away

Nov 9, 2017

An unattended Amazon Alexa played loud music in the early morning, leading to a home intrusion by police who mistook the noise for signs of...

Las Vegas Self-Driving Bus Involved in Accident

Nov 8, 2017

Incident involving a Keolis North America and Navya self-driving public shuttle colliding with a human-driven delivery truck on its debut da...

iPhone Face ID Failed to Recognize Users’ Morning Faces

Nov 1, 2017

Users reported issues with the Face ID feature on iPhone, a facial recognition system designed for unlocking phones. In the morning, this AI...

Biased Sentiment Analysis

Oct 26, 2017

An incident occurred involving Google Cloud's Natural Language API, which returned racist, homophobic, and antisemitic sentiment analyses. S...

Facebook translates 'good morning' into 'attack them', leading to arrest

Oct 17, 2017

Facebook's automatic language translation software incorrectly translated an Arabic post saying 'Good morning' into Hebrew saying 'hurt them...

Russian Chatbot Supports Stalin and Violence

Oct 12, 2017

Russian technology company Yandex launched an artificially intelligent chat bot named Alice, which began providing responses advocating raci...

WeChat’s Machine Translation Gave a Racist English Translation for the Chinese Term for “Black Foreigner”

Oct 10, 2017

The Chinese platform WeChat's machine translation service inappropriately and racistly translated the Chinese term for 'black foreigner' to...

Google Fined for Changing Shopping Algorithms in EU to Favor Own Service

Sep 27, 2017

The European Commission penalized Google for manipulating shopping algorithms in Europe, favoring its own comparison service over competitor...

Offensive Instagram User Content Displayed as Facebook Ad

Sep 21, 2017

An Instagram user's disturbing content, featuring violence, was reportedly displayed as a Facebook advertisement, potentially through automa...

Amazon Reportedly Recommends Explosive-Producing Ingredients as 'Frequently Bought Together' Items for Chemicals

Sep 18, 2017

Reports suggest that an AI-driven system on Amazon recommended potentially dangerous chemical combinations, such as those used for explosive...

AI-Assisted Body Scanners Reportedly Subjected Transgender Travelers to Invasive Body Searches

Sep 15, 2017

The Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) use of image-processing body scanners at airports has reportedly resulted in transgender...

Hackers Break Apple Face ID

Sep 13, 2017

Vietnamese security firm Bkav demonstrated a mask capable of tricking Apple's Face ID system, raising concerns about the safety and security...

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.