MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Category · 59.12.00
Data poisoning
Description
"Data poisoning describes an attack in the form of an injection of malicious data into the training set. If not prevented, this attack leads the AI system to learn unintended behavior."
From AI Hazard Management: A Framework for the Systematic Management of Root Causes for AI Risks (Schnitzer2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Domain
- 2. Privacy & Security
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Pre-deployment
Subdomain definition: Vulnerabilities in AI systems, software development toolchains, and hardware that can be exploited, resulting in unauthorized access, data and privacy breaches, or system manipulation causing unsafe outputs or behavior.
Real-world incidents in this subdomain
- COEMPT Quality Assurance Engineers Allegedly Violated Indian CBSE Student Data Privacy Rights by Processing It with Google Gemini
- Hidden Prompt Injection in Brazilian Labor-Court Petition Reportedly Tried to Manipulate Galileu
- Meta Internal AI Agent Reportedly Gave Advice That Allegedly Exposed Sensitive Data to Unauthorized Employees
- CodeWall's Autonomous Agent Reportedly Obtained Unauthorized Access to McKinsey's Lilli AI Platform Database
- Anthropic Said DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax Used Fraudulent Accounts and Proxies to Illicitly Distill Claude Capabilities at Scale
- DJI Romo Cloud Authorization Bug Reportedly Exposed Camera, Microphone, and Home-Mapping Data From Nearly 7,000 Robot Vacuums
How other frameworks describe this risk
Other entries from Schnitzer2024
- Inadequate specification of ODD
- Inappropriate degree of automation
- Inadequate planning of performance requirements
- Insufficient AI development documentation
- Inappropriate degree of transparency to end users
- Missing requirements for the implemented hardware
- Choice of untrustworthy data source
- Lack of data understanding
- Discriminative data bias
- Harming users’ data privacy
- Incorrect data labels
- Insufficient data representation