MIT AI Risk Repository
Browse AI risks
13 risk entries extracted from 74 frameworks, coded by domain, subdomain, causal entity, intent and timing. Filter, then export the current selection with its licence and citation attached.
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24.03.00 · Risk Category
"As AI assistants become more general purpose, sophisticated and capable, they create new opportunities in a variety of fields such as education, science and healthcare. Yet the rapid speed of progress has made it difficult to adequately prepare for, or even understand, how this technology can potentially be misused. Indeed, advanced AI assistants may transform existing threats or create new classes of threats altogether"
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"Phishing is a type of cybersecurity attack wherein attackers pose as trustworthy entities to extract sensitive information from unsuspecting victims or lure them to take a set of actions. Advanced AI systems can potentially be exploited by these attackers to make their phishing attempts significantly more effective and harder to detect. In particular, attackers may leverage the ability of advanced AI assistants to learn patterns in regular communications to craft highly convincing and personalized phishing emails, effectively imitating legitimate communications from trusted entities. This tec
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"While harmful content like child sexual abuse material, fraud, and disinformation are not new challenges for governments and developers, without the proper safety and security mechanisms, advanced AI assistants may allow threat actors to create harmful content more quickly, accurately, and with a longer reach. In particular, concerns arise in relation to the following areas: - Multimodal content quality: Driven by frontier models, advanced AI assistants can automatically generate much higher-quality, human-looking text, images, audio, and video than prior AI applications. Currently, creating
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24.03.12 · Risk Sub-Category
Authoritarian Surveillance, Censorship, and Use (General)
"While new technologies like advanced AI assistants can aid in the production and dissemination of decision-guiding information, they can also enable and exacerbate threats to production and dissemination of reliable information and, without the proper mitigations, can be powerful targeting tools for oppression and control. Increasingly capable general-purpose AI assistants combined with our digital dependence in all walks of life increase the risk of authoritarian surveillance and censorship. In parallel, new sensors have flooded the modern world. The internet of things, phones, cars, homes,
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24.03.13 · Risk Sub-Category
Authoritarian Surveillance, Censorship, and Use: Authoritarian Surveillance and Targeting of Citizens
"Authoritarian governments could misuse AI to improve the efficacy of repressive domestic surveillance campaigns. Malicious actors will recognize the power of AI targeting tools. AI-powered analytics have transformed the relationship between companies and consumers, and they are now doing the same for governments and individuals. The broad circulation of personal data drives commercial innovation, but it also creates vulnerabilities and the risk of misuse. For example, AI assistants can be used to identify and target individuals for surveillance or harassment. They may also be used to manipula
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24.03.14 · Risk Sub-Category
Authoritarian Surveillance, Censorship, and Use: Delegation of Decision-Making Authority to Malicious Actors
"Finally, the principal value proposition of AI assistants is that they can either enhance or automate decision-making capabilities of people in society, thus lowering the cost and increasing the accuracy of decision-making for its user. However, benefiting from this enhancement necessarily means delegating some degree of agency away from a human and towards an automated decision-making system—motivating research fields such as value alignment. This introduces a whole new form of malicious use which does not break the tripwire of what one might call an ‘attack’ (social engineering, cyber offen
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"Finally, AI assistants themselves could become weaponised by malicious actors to sow misinformation and manipulate public opinion at scale. Studies show that spreaders of disinformation tend to privilege quantity over quality of messaging, flooding online spaces repeatedly with misleading content to sow ‘seeds of doubt’ (Hassoun et al., 2023). Research on the ‘continued influence effect’ also shows that repeatedly being exposed to false information is more likely to influence someone’s thoughts than a single exposure. Studies show, for example, that repeated exposure to false information make
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"AI assistants may facilitate large-scale disinformation campaigns by offering novel, covert ways for propagandists to manipulate public opinion. This could undermine the democratic process by distorting public opinion and, in the worst case, increasing skepticism and political violence."
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"Offensive cyber operations are malicious attacks on computer systems and networks aimed at gaining unauthorized access to, manipulating, denying, disrupting, degrading, or destroying the target system. These attacks can target the system’s network, hardware, or software. Advanced AI assistants can be a double-edged sword in cybersecurity, benefiting both the defenders and the attackers. They can be used by cyber defenders to protect systems from malicious intruders by leveraging information trained on massive amounts of cyber-threat intelligence data, including vulnerabilities, attack pattern
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"A common element in offensive cyber operations involves the identification and exploitation of system vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access or control. Until recently, these activities required specialist programming knowledge. In the case of ‘zero-day’ vulnerabilities (flaws or weaknesses in software or an operating system that the creator or vendor is not aware of), considerable resources and technical creativity are typically required to manually discover such vulnerabilities, so their use is limited to well-resourced nation states or technically sophisticated advanced persistent thr
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"Malicious code is a term for code—whether it be part of a script or embedded in a software system—designed to cause damage, security breaches, or other threats to application security. Advanced AI assistants with the ability to produce source code can potentially lower the barrier to entry for threat actors with limited programming abilities or technical skills to produce malicious code. Recently, a series of proof-of-concept attacks have shown how a benign-seeming executable file can be crafted such that, at every runtime, it makes application programming interface (API) calls to an AI assis
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24.03.10 · Risk Sub-Category
Harmful Content Generation at Scale: Non-Consensual Content
"The misuse of generative AI has been widely recognized in the context of harms caused by non-consensual content generation. Historically, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been used to generate realistic-looking avatars for fake accounts on social media services. More recently, diffusion models have enabled a new generation of more flexible and user-friendly generative AI capabilities that are able to produce high-resolution media based on user-supplied textual prompts. It has already been recognized that these models can be used to create harmful content, including depictions of nu
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24.03.11 · Risk Sub-Category
Harmful Content Generation at Scale: Fraudulent Services
"Malicious actors could leverage advanced AI assistant technology to create deceptive applications and platforms. AI assistants with the ability to produce markup content can assist malicious users with creating fraudulent websites or applications at scale. Unsuspecting users may fall for AI-generated deceptive offers, thus exposing their personal information or devices to risk. Assistants with external tool use and third-party integration can enable fraudulent applications that target widely-used operating systems. These fraudulent services could harvest sensitive information from users, such
Informational only, not legal advice. Verify every claim against the linked official sources and consult qualified counsel before acting.