Unexpected Activation and Loud Behavior of Amazon Alexa Leads to Police Intervention

An Amazon Alexa device in a residential setting was reportedly activated without manual input and started playing music at high volume, causing a disturbance so loud that local authorities were called. The incident highlights the need for responsible AI governance and safe and secure AI practices.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

GOVERN 6.2 — similarity 0.474, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 4.3 — similarity 0.450, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.445, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/33

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.