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Fatalities Reportedly Occur Despite VioGén Algorithm's Low or Negligible Risk Scores

1 news report Synced from source · record last edited 5 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by VioGén algorithm development team, Spanish law enforcement agencies and 2 others and deployed by Spanish law enforcement agencies, Spanish Interior Ministry and 2 others allegedly harmed Women and girls, Women and 9 others.

Risk domain
AI system safety, failures, and limitations Lack of capability or robustness
Occurred
Coverage
1 reportJul 2024

What happened

The VioGén algorithm was designed to help Spanish police assess and prioritize the risk of repeat domestic violence incidents. However, its low-risk assessment of Lobna Hemid reportedly led to inadequate protection; her husband murdered her. Since 2007, 247 women have been killed after being assessed by VioGén. A review of 98 homicides found that 55 of the slain women were scored as negligible or low risk.

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.

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. An Algorithm Told Police She Was Safe. Then Her Husband Killed Her.
    nytimes.com · Adam Satariano, Roser Toll Pifarré, Ana María Arévalo Gosen

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Women and girls Women Victims of domestic abuse Stefany González Escarraman María Luz Lobna Hemid General public of Spain General public Eva Jaular 247 women in Spain (unnamed)

AI systems implicated

VioGénAI-enabled decision support systems

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
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)

Linked by editors or by text similarity in the source dataset.

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Source record: incident #747 on the AI Incident Database · all 1 report