Amazon Alexa Plays Loud Music when Owner is Away

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 in Germany.

• AI Act implementation act (KI-MIG, draft) Germany · Proposed · binding
• 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

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 (4)

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

1. 9 Nov 2017
   Alexa switches on and decides to have a party so loud the police came

   mashable.com · Gianluca Mezzofiore
2. 10 Nov 2017
   Alexa, please cause the cops to raid my home

   theregister.co.uk · Kieren McCarthy
3. 13 Nov 2017
   Audio spy Alexa now has a little pal called Dox

   theregister.co.uk · Gareth Corfield
4. 11 Apr 2018
   Top 5 AI Failures From 2017 Which Prove That ‘Perfect AI’ Is Still A Dream

   analyticsindiamag.com · Srishti Deoras

Who was involved

Alleged deployer

Amazon

Alleged developer

Amazon

Alleged harmed party

Oliver Haberstroh, Neighbors

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

AI

Intent

Unintentional

Timing

Post-deployment

Harm level

none

Sectors

information and communication

Countries

DE

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 Amazon

• 8 Apr 2023Amazon Algorithmic Pricing Allegedly Hiked up Price of Reference Book to Millions
• 4 Feb 2022Amazon Reportedly Sold Products and Recommended Frequently Bought Together Items That Aid Suicide Attempts
• 26 Dec 2021Alexa Recommended Dangerous TikTok Challenge to Ten-Year-Old Girl
• 20 Sep 2021Amazon's AI Cameras Incorrectly Penalized Delivery Drivers for Mistakes They Did Not Make
• 15 Mar 2021Amazon's Monitoring System Allegedly Pushed Delivery Drivers to Prioritize Speed over Safety, Leading to Crash
• 2 Mar 2021Amazon Allegedly Forced Deployment of AI-Powered Cameras on Delivery Drivers