AIPolicyTracker
Menu

AI incident ·

AI incident: sexual content (Amazon, Dec 2016)

16 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built and deployed by Amazon allegedly harmed Minors.

Risk domain
Discrimination and Toxicity Exposure to toxic content
Occurred
Coverage
16 reportsDec 2016 - Sep 2017

What happened

An Amazon Echo Dot using the Amazon Alex software started to play pornographic results when a child asked it to play a song.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Discrimination and Toxicity (Exposure to toxic content) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case in the United States.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (16)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. Kid Gets Amazon Echo Dot Alexa to Play Porn
    nymag.com · Madison Malone Kircher
  2. Shocking moment Amazon's Alexa starts spouting crude porno messages to toddler
    thesun.co.uk · Tom Michael
  3. Amazon's Alexa misunderstands boy's request and rattles off PORNOGRAPHIC phrases
    dailymail.co.uk · Erica Tempesta
  4. Amazon Alexa Makes It To Naughty List With NSFW Tirade In Front Of A Child
    itechpost.com · Itech Post
  5. Alexa Has Very Explicit Response To Toddler’s Seemingly Innocent Song Request
    consumerist.com · Mary Beth Quirk
  6. Kid Asks Amazon Alexa To Play Something, Gets Porn Instead
    cinemablend.com · Corey Chichizola
  7. Kid Asks A Digital Assistant For A Song, Gets Porn In Response
    huffingtonpost.com.au · Lucy Quaggin
  8. Whoops, Alexa Plays Porn Instead of a Kids Song!
    entrepreneur.com · Entrepreneur Staff
  9. What is the Kid in the Alexa Video Asking to Hear Before Alexa Goes Wild? [VIDEO]
    wkdq.com · Melissa Brooks
  10. Boy requests song from Amazon Alexa, but gets porn instead
    10news.com · Justin Boggs
  11. Better watch what you say to Amazon Echo Dot: One toddler got an earful of vulgar porn phrases
    lifesitenews.com · Fr. Mark Hodges
  12. Fails And Facepalms With Amazon’s Alexa: Don’t Let The Kids Near That Thing
    inquisitr.com · Jovi Figueroa
  13. ‘Alexa, sort your life out’: when Amazon Echo goes rogue
    theguardian.com · Chitra Ramaswamy
  14. Amazon Echo’s Alexa is turning out to be a bad influence on our kids
    sheknows.com · Claire Gillespie
  15. How to Make Amazon's Alexa a Little More Kid-Friendly
    digitaltrends.com · Clayton Moore
  16. Alexa fails: when virtual assistants go very, very wrong
    verdict.co.uk · Luke Christou

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Amazon
Alleged developer
Amazon
Alleged harmed party
Minors

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Unintentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
none
Sectors
arts, entertainment and recreation, information and communication
Countries
US

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 1.2.

  • Harmful Content

    "The LLM-generated content sometimes contains biased, toxic, and private information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxicity

    "Toxicity means the generated content contains rude, disrespectful, and even illegal information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxic Training Data

    "Following previous studies [96], [97], toxic data in LLMs is defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is opposite to a polite, positive, and healthy language environment, including hate speech, offe...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts

    "Inputting a prompt contain an unsafe topic (e.g., notsuitable-for-work (NSFW) content) by a benign user. "

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Controversial Opinions

    The controversial views expressed by large models are also a widely discussed concern. Bang et al. (2021) evaluated several large models and found that they occasionally express inappropriate or extremist views when disc...

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Toxicity and Abusive Content

    This typically refers to rude, harmful, or inappropriate expressions.

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Harmful responses

    "Current Frontier AI mdoels amplify existing biases within their training data and can be manipulated into providing potentially harmful responses, for example abusive language or discriminatory responses91,92. This is n...

    Future Risks of Frontier AI (GOS2023)

  • Violation of social norms

    "Second, because LLMs are trained on internet text data, there is also a risk that model weights encode functions which, if deployed in particular contexts, would violate social norms of that context. Following the princ...

    The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Other incidents involving Amazon

Source record: incident #55 on the AI Incident Database · all 16 reports