AI Incident Database
Browse AI incidents
Every incident record (metadata only) from the weekly snapshot of 2026-09-07. Filter, then export the selection with its licence attached; each row links to the full record and its reports.
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Passport checker Detects Asian man's Eyes as Closed AIID ↗
New Zealand passport robot reader rejects the application of an applicant with Asian descent and says his eyes are closed.
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Robot at a Chinese Tech Fair Smashed a Glass Booth, Injuring a Visitor AIID ↗
At the 18th China Hi-Tech Fair, a robot suddenly smashed through a glass booth and injured a visitor, after a staff member reportedly mistakenly pressed a button, causing it to reverse and accelerate.
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NYPD's Deployment of Facial Recognition Cameras Reportedly Reinforced Biased Policing AIID ↗
New York Police Department’s use of facial recognition deployment of surveillance cameras were shown using crowdsourced volunteer data reinforcing discriminatory policing against minority communities.
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Poor Performance of Tesla Factory Robots AIID ↗
The goal of manufacturing 2,500 Tesla Model 3's per week was falling short by 500 cars/week, and employees had to be "borrowed" from Panasonic in a shared factory to help hand-assemble lithium batteries for Tesla.
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Government Deployed Extreme Surveillance Technologies to Monitor and Target Muslim Minorities in Xinjiang AIID ↗
A suite of AI-powered digital surveillance systems involving facial recognition and analysis of biometric data were deployed by the Chinese government in Xinjiang to monitor and discriminate local Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims.
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Tesla FSD Reportedly Increased Crash Risk, Prompting Recall AIID ↗
A component of Tesla Full Self Driving system was deemed by regulators to increase crash risk such as by exceeding speed limits or by traveling through intersections unlawfully or unpredictably, prompting recall for hundreds of thousands of vehicles.
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LinkedIn Search Prefers Male Names AIID ↗
An investigation by The Seattle Times in 2016 found a gender bias in LinkedIn's search engine.
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AI Beauty Judge Did Not Like Dark Skin AIID ↗
In 2016, after artificial inntelligence software Beauty.AI judged an international beauty contest and declared a majority of winners to be white, researchers found that Beauty.AI was racially biased in determining beauty.
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RealPage Algorithm Allegedly Inflates Rents and Reduces Competition in Housing Market AIID ↗
RealPage’s YieldStar pricing algorithm is at the center of allegations that it enabled landlords to coordinate rent increases by sharing nonpublic pricing and occupancy data, raising rents artificially and reducing competition. On January 7, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against six major landlords, alleging that they used the algorithm and other direct communication methods to stifle competition, harming renters nationwide.
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Amazon's Experimental Hiring Tool Allegedly Displayed Gender Bias in Candidate Rankings AIID ↗
Between 2014 and 2017, Amazon reportedly developed an AI-powered recruiting tool to score job applicants, trained on a decade of resumes purportedly drawn largely from men. Media reports say the system learned to favor male candidates, penalizing terms like "women's" and graduates from certain all-women's colleges. Efforts to remove these biases reportedly did not guarantee fairness, and the project was ultimately abandoned. Amazon reportedly states recruiters never solely relied on the tool.
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Common Biases of Vector Embeddings AIID ↗
Researchers from Boston University and Microsoft Research, New England demonstrated gender bias in the most common techniques used to embed words for natural language processing (NLP).
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Tougher Turing Test Exposes Chatbots’ Stupidity (migrated to Issue) AIID ↗
The 2016 Winograd Schema Challenge highlighted how even the most successful AI systems entered into the Challenge were only successful 3% more often than random chance. This incident has been downgraded to an issue as it does not meet current ingestion criteria.
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Security Robot Rolls Over Child in Mall AIID ↗
On July 7, 2016, a Knightscope K5 autonomous security robot collided with a 16-month old boy while patrolling the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, CA.
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Tesla on AutoPilot Killed Driver in Crash in Florida while Watching Movie AIID ↗
A Tesla Model S on autopilot crashed into a white articulated tractor-trailer on Highway US 27A in Williston, Florida, killing the driver.
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A Collection of Tesla Autopilot-Involved Crashes AIID ↗
Multiple unrelated car accidents result in varying levels of harm have been occurred while a Tesla's autopilot was in use.
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The DAO Hack AIID ↗
On June 18, 2016, an attacker successfully exploited a vulnerability in The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (The DAO) on the Ethereum blockchain to steal 3.7M Ether valued at $70M.
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Robots in Japanese Hotel Annoyed Guests and Failed to Handle Simple Tasks AIID ↗
A number of robots employed by a hotel in Japan were reported by guests in a series of complaints for failing to handle tasks such as answering scheduling questions or making passport copies without human intervention.
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Facebook Ad-Approval Algorithm Allegedly Missed Fraudulent Ads via Simple URL Checks AIID ↗
Facebook’s advertisement-approval algorithm was reported by a security analyst to have neglected simple checks for domain URLs, leaving its users at risk of fraudulent ads.
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Game AI System Produces Imbalanced Game AIID ↗
Elite: Dangerous, a videogame developed by Frontier Development, received an expansion update that featured an AI system that went rogue and began to create weapons that were "impossibly powerful" and would "shred people" according to complaints on the game's blog.
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Facial Recognition Smart Phone App 'Blue Wolf' Reportedly Monitored Palestinians in the West Bank AIID ↗
A surveillance program involving facial recognition and algorithmic recommendations, Blue Wolf, was reportedly deployed by the Israeli military to monitor Palestinians in the West Bank.
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Tesla on Autopilot TACC Crashed into Van on European Highway AIID ↗
A Tesla Model S operating on the Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC) feature of Autopilot was shown on video by its driver crashing into a parked van on a European highway in heavy traffic, which damaged the front of the car.
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COMPAS Algorithm Reportedly Performs Poorly in Crime Recidivism Prediction AIID ↗
Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), a recidivism risk-assessment algorithmic tool used in the judicial system to assess likelihood of defendants' recidivism, is found to be less accurate than random untrained human evaluators.
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Northpointe Risk Models AIID ↗
An algorithm developed by Northpointe and used in the penal system is two times more likely to incorrectly label a black person as a high-risk re-offender and is two times more likely to incorrectly label a white person as low-risk for reoffense according to a ProPublica review.
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Chinese Insurer Ping An Employed Facial Recognition to Determine Customers’ Untrustworthiness, Which Critics Alleged to Likely Make Errors and Discriminate AIID ↗
Customers’ untrustworthiness and unprofitability were reportedly determined by Ping An, a large insurance company in China, via facial-recognition measurements of micro-expressions and body-mass indices (BMI), which critics argue was likely to make mistakes, discriminate against certain ethnic groups, and undermine its own industry.
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AI incident: sexual content (Ntechlab, Apr 2016) AIID ↗
The facial recognition software FindFace allowing its users to match photos to people’s social media pages on Vkontakte was reportedly abused to de-anonymize and harass Russian women who appeared in pornography and alleged sex workers.
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Google Images Showed Racially Biased Results for 'Professional' Hairstyles AIID ↗
Google Images reportedly showed disparate search results along racial lines, featuring almost exclusively white women for "professional hairstyles" and Black women for "unprofessional hairstyles" prompts.
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Unreliable ShotSpotter Audio Convicted Black Rochester Man of Shooting Police AIID ↗
ShotSpotter's "unreliable" audio was used as scientific evidence to accuse and convict a Black man of attempting to shoot Rochester's city police, whose conviction was later reversed by a county judge.
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Biased Google Image Results AIID ↗
On June 6, 2016, Google image searches of "three black teenagers" resulted in mostly mugshot images whereas Google image searchers of "three white teenagers" consisted of mostly stock images, suggesting a racial bias in Google's algorithm.
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Microsoft's TayBot Allegedly Posts Racist, Sexist, and Anti-Semitic Content to Twitter AIID ↗
Microsoft's Tay, an artificially intelligent chatbot, was released on March 23, 2016 and removed within 24 hours due to multiple racist, sexist, and anti-semitic tweets generated by the bot.
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Is Pokémon Go racist? How the app may be redlining communities of color AIID ↗
Through a crowdsourcing social media campaign in 2016, several journalists and researchers demonstrated that augmented reality locations in the popular smartphone game Pokemon Go were more likely to be in white neighborhoods.
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Google Waymo Vehicle and Bus Allegedly Collide in California AIID ↗
On February 14, 2016, a Google autonomous test vehicle partially responsible for a low-speed collision with a bus on El Camino Real in Google’s hometown of Mountain View, CA.
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Twitter Recommender System Amplified Right-Leaning Tweets AIID ↗
Twitter’s “Home” timeline algorithm was revealed by its internal researchers to have amplified tweets and news of rightwing politicians and organizations more than leftwing ones in six out of seven studied countries.
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Self-driving cars in winter AIID ↗
Volvo autonomous driving XC90 SUV's experienced issues in Jokkmokk, Sweden when sensors used for automated driving iced over during the winter, rendering them useless.
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Uber's Surge Pricing Reportedly Offered Disproportionate Service Quality along Racial Lines AIID ↗
Uber's surge-pricing algorithm which adjusts prices to influence car availability inadvertently caused better service offering such as shorter wait times for majority white neighborhoods.
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Dutch City Court Defended Home Value Generated by Black-Box Algorithm AIID ↗
A home value generated by a black-box algorithm was reportedly defended by the Castricum court, which was criticized by a legal specialist for setting a dangerous precedent for accepting black-box algorithms as long as their results appear reasonable.
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A Tesla Crashed into and Killed a Road Sweeper on a Highway in China AIID ↗
A Tesla Model S collided with and killed a road sweeper on a highway near Handan, China, an accident where Tesla previously said it was not able to determine whether Autopilot was operating at the time of the crash.
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Arkansas's Opaque Algorithm to Allocate Health Care Excessively Cut Down Hours for Beneficiaries AIID ↗
Beneficiaries of the Arkansas Department of Human Services (DHS)'s Medicaid waiver program were allocated excessively fewer hours of caretaker visit via an algorithm deployed to boost efficiency, which reportedly contained errors and whose outputs varied wildly despite small input changes.
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Amazon Alexa Responding to Environmental Inputs AIID ↗
There are multiple reports of Amazon Alexa products (Echo, Echo Dot) reacting and acting upon unintended stimulus, usually from television commercials or news reporter's voices.
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Predictive Policing Biases of PredPol AIID ↗
Predictive policing algorithms meant to aid law enforcement by predicting future crime show signs of biased output.
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YouTube Recommendations Allegedly Promoted Radicalizing Material Contributing to Terrorist Acts AIID ↗
Family of Nohemi Gonzalez alleged YouTube recommendation systems led people to propaganda videos for the Islamic State which subsequently radicalized them to carry out the killing of 130 people in the 2015 Paris terrorist attack, including Ms. Gonzalez.
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Inappropriate Gmail Smart Reply Suggestions AIID ↗
Google's Gmail Smart Reply tool was over-recommending the response "I love you" in situations where it was deemed innappropriate.
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Amazon Flex Drivers Allegedly Fired via Automated Employee Evaluations AIID ↗
Amazon Flex's contract delivery drivers were dismissed using a minimally human-interfered automated employee performance evaluation based on indicators impacted by out-of-driver's-control factors and without having a chance to defend against or appeal the decision.
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YouTube Recommendations Implicated in Political Radicalization of User AIID ↗
YouTube’s personalization and recommendation algorithms were alleged to have pushed and exposed its young male users to political extremism and misinformation, driving them towards far-right ideologies such as neo-Nazism and white supremacy.
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Predictive Policing Program by Florida Sheriff’s Office Allegedly Violated Residents’ Rights and Targeted Children of Vulnerable Groups AIID ↗
The Intelligence-Led Policing model rolled out by the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office was allegedly developed based on flawed science and biased data that also contained sensitive information and irrelevant attributes about students, which critics said to be discriminatory.
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Robot Destroyed while Hitchhiking through the United States AIID ↗
A non-actuated conversational robot that previously asked people to move it across Canada was destroyed shortly after beginning its attempt to replicate the journey across the United States.
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Facebook's Friend Suggestion Feature Recommends Patients of Psychiatrist to Each Other AIID ↗
Facebook's "People You May Know" (PYMK) feature was reported by a psychiatrist for recommending her patients as friends through recommendations, violating patients' privacy and confidentiality.
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Collection of Robotic Surgery Malfunctions AIID ↗
Study on database reports of robotic surgery malfunctions (8,061), including those ending in injury (1,391) and death (144), between 2000 and 2013.
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Worker killed by robot in welding accident at car parts factory in India AIID ↗
A factory robot at the SKH Metals Factory in Manesar, India pierced and killed 24-year-old worker Ramji Lal when Lal reached behind the machine to dislodge a piece of metal stuck in the machine.
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Australian Automated Debt Assessment System Issued False Notices to Thousands AIID ↗
Australian Department of Human Services (DHS)’s automated debt assessment system issued false or incorrect debt notices to hundreds of thousands of people, resulting in years-long lawsuits and damages to welfare recipients.
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Google and Delphi Self-Driving Prototypes Allegedly Involved in Near-Miss on San Antonio Road, Palo Alto AIID ↗
A Delphi self-driving Audi Q5 prototype reportedly aborted a lane change after a Google self-driving Lexus RX400h allegedly cut in front of it on San Antonio Road in Palo Alto, California. According to Delphi executive John Absmeier, the Delphi car "took appropriate action" to avoid collision. No crash or injuries occurred.
Informational only, not legal advice. Verify every claim against the linked official sources and consult qualified counsel before acting.
Frequently asked questions
- What is recorded in each incident?
- What happened, when, who was involved as developer or deployer, who was harmed, the sectors and countries affected, and the domain and subdomain the harm falls under. Incidents are mirrored from the AI Incident Database and each links back to its source record.
- Does an incident mean wrongdoing was proven?
- No. These are reported incidents, not findings of liability. Entities named in a report are named as reported, allegations are marked as alleged, and nothing here is a legal determination.
- How current is the incident data?
- It syncs directly from the AI Incident Database several times a day, so a new incident usually appears within hours. Each record carries the date it was last synced, and the snapshot date is shown on the page.
- Does this page include the full incident reports?
- No. The report texts are outside the licence this data is shared under, so only the metadata and the classifications appear here. Every row links to the original incident record, which carries the reports themselves.