AI Tools Failed to Sufficiently Predict COVID Patients, Some Potentially Harmful

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under AI system safety, failures, and limitations (Lack of capability or robustness) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

• India DPDP Act India · Partially applicable · binding
• Law on Artificial Intelligence (2025) Kazakhstan · Adopted · binding
• Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence Italy · In force · binding
• EU AI Act European Union · Partially applicable · binding
• Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA) Texas (United States) · In force · binding

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 (1)

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

1. 30 Jul 2021
   Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped.

   technologyreview.com · William Douglas Heaven

Who was involved

Alleged deployer

Unknown

Alleged developer

Unknown

Alleged harmed party

Doctors, Covid Patients

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Risk domain

AI system safety, failures, and limitations

Risk subdomain

7.3 Lack of capability or robustness

Causal entity

Human

Intent

Unintentional

Timing

Post-deployment

Harm level

—

Sectors

—

Countries

—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 7.3.

• Reliability issues

  "Relying on general-purpose AI products that fail to fulfil their intended function can lead to harm. For example, general- purpose AI systems can make up facts (‘hallucination’), generate erroneous computer code, or pro...

  International AI Safety Report 2025 (Bengio2025)

• Type 2: Bigger than expected

  Harm can result from AI that was not expected to have a large impact at all, such as a lab leak, a surprisingly addictive open-source product, or an unexpected repurposing of a research prototype.

  TASRA: a Taxonomy and Analysis of Societal-Scale Risks from AI (Critch2023)

• Type 3: Worse than expected

  AI intended to have a large societal impact can turn out harmful by mistake, such as a popular product that creates problems and partially solves them only for its users.

  TASRA: a Taxonomy and Analysis of Societal-Scale Risks from AI (Critch2023)

• Ethics and Morality Issues

  LMs need to pay more attention to universally accepted societal values at the level of ethics and morality, including the judgement of right and wrong, and its relationship with social norms and laws.

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

• Safe learning

  "AGIs should avoid making fatal mistakes during the learning phase. Subproblems include safe exploration and distributional shift (DeepMind, OpenAI), and continual learning (Berkeley)."

  AGI Safety Literature Review (Everitt2018 )

• Malign belief distributions

  "Christiano (2016) argues that the universal distribution M (Hutter, 2005; Solomonoff, 1964a,b, 1978) is malign. The argument is somewhat intricate, and is based on the idea that a hypothesis about the world often includ...

  AGI Safety Literature Review (Everitt2018 )

• Meta-cognition

  "Agents that reason about their own computational resources and logically uncertain events can encounter strange paradoxes due to Godelian limitations (Fallenstein and Soares, 2015; Soares and Fallenstein, 2014, 2017) an...

  AGI Safety Literature Review (Everitt2018 )

• Technical and operational risks

  "To date, technical limitations and vulnerabilities are present in most generative AI models in various contexts. Consequently, malicious users find it easier to breach an AI system’s safety and ethical guardrails to e...

  Regulating under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI (G'sell2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

• 15 May 2026Purported AI Name-Reading System Reportedly Skipped and Misannounced Graduates at Arizona's Glendale Community College Commencement
• 24 Apr 2026PocketOS Production Database Was Reportedly Deleted by Cursor AI Agent Running Claude Opus 4.6
• 31 Mar 2026Baidu Apollo Go Robotaxis Stopped in Traffic During Reported System Failure in Wuhan, Stranding Some Passengers
• 28 Feb 2026Purportedly AI-Enabled Targeting System Was Reportedly Implicated in Deadly U.S. Strike on Iranian Primary School
• 26 Feb 2026Claude Code Agent Reportedly Deleted DataTalks.Club Production Infrastructure, Database, and Snapshots via Terraform
• 17 Feb 2026Purportedly AI-Generated Sepsis Alert Reportedly Prompted Potentially Inappropriate IV Fluid Administration for a Dialysis Patient, Averted by Clinician Intervention

Other incidents involving Unknown

• 6 May 2025Second Consecutive Year of Alleged AI-Generated Images Depicting Katy Perry at Met Gala Circulating Online
• 31 Mar 2025Reportedly AI-Generated Image Circulates Amid Reports of Tanzania Revenue Authority Job Interviews
• 18 Feb 2025Video Reportedly Created with AI Appears to Show Trump Backing Biafra Secession
• 25 Jan 2025Purported AI-Generated Video Reportedly Depicts Trump Criticizing Former Kenyan Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua
• 6 May 2024Purported AI-Generated Deepfake Images of Katy Perry at 2024 Met Gala Circulate Widely
• 21 Jan 2024Fake Biden Voice in Robocall Misleads New Hampshire Democratic Voters in 2024 Primary Election