Toxic content

Classification

Domain

1. Discrimination & Toxicity

Subdomain

1.2 Exposure to toxic content

Causal entity

AI

Intent

Unintentional

Timing

Post-deployment

Subdomain definition: AI exposing users to harmful, abusive, unsafe or inappropriate content. May involve AI creating, describing, providing advice, or encouraging action. Examples of toxic content include hate-speech, violence, extremism, illegal acts, child sexual abuse material, as well as content that violates community norms such as profanity, inflammatory political speech, or pornography.

Real-world incidents in this subdomain

• 2 Apr 2026KBS AI Translation Subtitles Reportedly Broadcast Profanity During Artemis II Launch Livestream
• 10 Mar 2026Grok Allegedly Generated Publicly Visible Sexist Abuse Targeting Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter After X User Prompt
• 5 Feb 2026Trump Reportedly Posted Purportedly AI-Generated Racist Video Depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Apes on Truth Social
• 2 Jan 2026Tencent's WeChat-Integrated Yuanbao Chatbot Reportedly Insulted User During Coding Debug Request
• 21 Nov 2025Alleged Harmful Outputs and Data Exposure in Children's AI Products by FoloToy, Miko, and Character.AI
• 24 Oct 2025AI Training Dataset for Detecting Nudity Allegedly Found to Contain CSAM Images of Identified Victims

How other frameworks describe this risk

• Harmful Content

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Toxicity

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Toxic Training Data

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Controversial Opinions

  Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

• Toxicity and Abusive Content

  Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

• Harmful responses

  Future Risks of Frontier AI (GOS2023)

• Violation of social norms

  The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

Other entries from Weidinger2023

• Representation & Toxicity Harms Risk Category · 1.0
• Unfair representation Risk Sub-Category · 1.1
• Unfair capability distribution Risk Sub-Category · 1.3
• Misinformation Harms Risk Category · 3.0
• Propagating misconceptions/ false beliefs Risk Sub-Category · 3.1
• Erosion of trust in public information Risk Sub-Category · 1.1
• Pollution of information ecosystem Risk Sub-Category · 3.2
• Information & Safety Harms Risk Category · 2.1
• Privacy infringement Risk Sub-Category · 2.1
• Dissemination of dangerous information Risk Sub-Category · 2.1
• Malicious Use Risk Category · 4.0
• Influence operations Risk Sub-Category · 4.1