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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UK High Court Found Sky Betting & Gaming Unlawfully Used Automated Profiling and Targeted Marketing to Exploit a Recovering Problem Gambler AIID ↗
In the UK, the High Court found that Sky Betting & Gaming unlawfully used automated profiling and targeted direct marketing to pursue a recovering problem gambler from July 28, 2017 onward without valid consent. Sky reportedly treated him as a high-value customer despite addiction indicators.
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Security Robot Drowns Itself in a Fountain AIID ↗
A Knightscope K5 security robot ran itself into a water fountain in Washington, DC.
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AI-Designed Phone Cases Are Unexpected AIID ↗
A third-party Amazon merchant named “my_handy_design” was suspected of using a bot to generate cell phone case designs based on the bizarre and unattractive designs being offered.
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Atlas Robot Fell off Stage at Conference AIID ↗
Boston Dynamics’s autonomous robot Atlas allegedly caught its foot on a stage light, resulting in a fall off the stage at the Congress of Future Science and Technology Leaders conference.
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Airbnb's Trustworthiness Algorithm Allegedly Banned Users without Explanation, and Discriminated against Sex Workers AIID ↗
Airbnb allegedly considered publicly available data on users to gauge their trustworthiness via algorithmic assessment of personality and behavioral traits, resulting in unexplained bans and discriminatory bans against sex workers.
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Deepfake Obama Introduction of Deepfakes AIID ↗
University of Washington researchers made a deepfake of Obama, followed by Jordan Peele
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Clearview AI Algorithm Built on Photos Scraped from Social Media Profiles without Consent AIID ↗
Face-matching algorithm by Clearview AI was built using scraped images from social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook without user consent, violating social media site policies, and allegedly privacy regulations.
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High False Positive Rate by SWP's Facial Recognition Use at Champion's League Final AIID ↗
South Wales Police (SWP)’s automated facial recognition (AFR) at the Champion's League Final football game in Cardiff wrongly identified innocent people as potential matches at an extremely high false positive rate of more than 90%.
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BBC Reporter's Twin Brother Cracked HSBC's Voice ID Authentication AIID ↗
HSBC’s voice recognition authentication system was fooled after seven repeated attempts by a BBC reporter's twin brother who mimicked his voice to access his bank account.
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Houston ISD's EVAAS Teacher-Evaluation System Reportedly Put Teachers' Jobs at Risk Through Unverifiable Scores AIID ↗
From 2011 to 2015, Houston Independent School District used SAS Institute’s Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS) to rate teacher effectiveness from student test-score growth. Teachers alleged that proprietary, unverifiable EVAAS scores contributed to terminations and contract nonrenewals. On May 4, 2017, a federal judge allowed due-process claims over the system to proceed.
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Overfit Kaggle Models Discouraged Data Science Competitors AIID ↗
In the “The Nature Conservancy Fisheries Monitoring” competition on the data science competition website Kaggle, a number of competitors overfit their image classifier models to a poorly representative validation data set.
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New York Detective Reportedly Misused Woody Harrelson's Face to Perform Face Recognition Search AIID ↗
When the facial recognition search for a CVS theft suspect's face returned no useful matches due to the surveillance footage being obscured and highly pixelated, a New York City police detective continued the face search using Woody Harrelson's face allegedly due to his resemblance to the suspect's face, eventually leading to the arrest of an unknown victim.
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Facebook Reportedly Outed Sex Workers through Friend Recommendations AIID ↗
Facebook's "People You May Know" feature reportedly outed sex workers by recommending clients to their personal accounts or family members to their business accounts with no option to opt out.
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Gender Biases in Google Translate AIID ↗
A Cornell University study in 2016 highlighted Google Translate's pattern of assigning gender to occupations in a way showing an implicit gender bias against women.
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Pennsylvania County's Family Screening Tool Allegedly Exhibited Discriminatory Effects AIID ↗
Data analysis by the American Civil Liberty Union (ACLU) on Allegheny County's decision-support Family Screening Tool to predict child abuse or neglect risk found the tool resulting in higher screen-in rates for Black families and higher risk scores for households with disabled residents.
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IBM Watson for Oncology Criticized by Customers for Allegedly Unsafe and Inaccurate Cancer Treatment Recommendations AIID ↗
Internal documents from IBM Watson Health showed negative assessments from customers such as Florida’s Jupiter Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering criticizing its Watson for Oncology product for allegedly unsafe and incorrect cancer treatment recommendations.
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Nissan's "Automatic Emergency Braking" False Positives Posed Traffic Risks to Drivers AIID ↗
Nissan's Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) feature was reported in a series of complaints for false positives and abrupt braking behaviors, endangering car occupants and traffic participants.
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Social Media's Automated Word-Flagging without Context Shifted Content Creators' Language Use AIID ↗
TikTok's, YouTube's, Instagram's, and Twitch's use of algorithms to flag certain words devoid of context changed content creators' use of everyday language or discussion about certain topics in fear of their content getting flagged or auto-demonetized by mistake.
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Uber Locked Indian Drivers out of Accounts Allegedly Due to Facial Recognition Fails AIID ↗
Uber drivers in India reported being locked out of their accounts allegedly due to Real-Time ID Check's facial recognition failing to recognize appearance changes or faces in low lighting conditions.
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Male College Freshman Allegedly Made Porn Deepfakes Using Female Friend's Face AIID ↗
A female college student's face was superimposed on another woman's body in deepfake pornographic videos and shared on 4chan allegedly by a male student whose friendship with her fell apart during freshman year.
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High-Toxicity Assessed on Text Involving Women and Minority Groups AIID ↗
Google's Perspective API, which assigns a toxicity score to online text, seems to award higher toxicity scores to content involving non-white, male, Christian, heterosexual phrases.
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Wikipedia Vandalism Prevention Bot Loop AIID ↗
Wikipedia bots meant to remove vandalism clash with each other and form feedback loops of repetitve undoing of the other bot's edits.
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Honda's CMBS False Positives Allegedly Caused Accidents to Customers AIID ↗
Honda's Collision Mitigation Braking System (CMBS) allegedly caused accidents to consumers due to frequent instances of false obstacle detection.
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ByteDance Allegedly Trained "For You" Algorithm Using Content Scraped without Consent from Other Social Platforms AIID ↗
ByteDance allegedly scraped short-form videos, usernames, profile pictures, and descriptions of accounts on Instagram, Snapchat, and other sources, and uploaded them without consent on Flipagram, TikTok’s predecessor, in order to improve its “For You” algorithm's performance on American users.
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RealPage's YieldStar Allegedly Facilitated Rent Price Coordination Among Canadian Landlords AIID ↗
RealPage’s YieldStar algorithm is alleged to have enabled Canadian landlords to coordinate rental pricing by utilizing sensitive, non-public market data. The software has been accused of contributing to rent increases in non-rent-controlled units through purported collusion and artificial price inflation. Tenants have reported significant rent hikes, which they attribute to landlords' use of the algorithm.
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PimEyes's Facial Recognition AI Allegedly Lacked Safeguards to Prevent Itself from Being Abused AIID ↗
PimEyes offered its subscription-based AI service to anyone in the public to search for matching facial images across the internet, which critics said lacked public oversight and government rules to prevent itself from misuse such as stalking women.
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Amazon India Allegedly Rigged Search Results to Promote Own Products AIID ↗
Amazon India allegedly copied products and rigged search algorithm to boost its own brands in search ranking, violating antitrust laws.
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Alexa Plays Pornography Instead of Kids Song AIID ↗
An Amazon Echo Dot using the Amazon Alex software started to play pornographic results when a child asked it to play a song.
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Reinforcement Learning Reward Functions in Video Games AIID ↗
OpenAI published a post about its findings when using Universe, a software for measuring and training AI agents to conduct reinforcement learning experiments, showing that the AI agent did not act in the way intended to complete a videogame.
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“Amazon’s Choice” Algorithm Failed to Recommend Functional Products and Prone to Review Manipulation AIID ↗
Amazon’s “Amazon’s Choice” algorithm recommended poor-quality defective products and were reportedly susceptible to manipulation by inauthentic reviews.
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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.
Informational only, not legal advice. Verify every claim against the linked official sources and consult qualified counsel before acting.