MIT AI Risk Repository
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4 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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24.01.00 · Risk Category
"One reason AI systems fail is because they lack the capability or skill needed to do what they are asked to do."
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"As we have seen, this could be due to the skill not being required during the training process (perhaps due to issues with the training data) or because the learnt skill was quite brittle and was not generalisable to a new situation (lack of robustness to distributional shift). In particular, advanced AI assistants may not have the capability to represent complex concepts that are pertinent to their own ethical impact, for example the concept of 'benefitting the user' or 'when the user asks' or representing 'the way in which a user expects to be benefitted'."
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24.01.03 · Risk Sub-Category
Safe exploration problem with widely deployed AI assistants
"Moreover, we can expect assistants – that are widely deployed and deeply embedded across a range of social contexts – to encounter the safe exploration problem referenced above Amodei et al. (2016). For example, new users may have different requirements that need to be explored, or widespread AI assistants may change the way we live, thus leading to a change in our use cases for them (see Chapters 14 and 15). To learn what to do in these new situations, the assistants may need to take exploratory actions. This could be unsafe, for example a medical AI assistant when encountering a new disease
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"As we think about even more intelligent and advanced AI assistants, perhaps outperforming humans on many cognitive tasks, the question of how humans can successfully control such an assistant looms large. To achieve the goals we set for an assistant, it is possible (Shah, 2022) that the AI assistant will implement some form of consequentialist reasoning: considering many different plans, predicting their consequences and executing the plan that does best according to some metric, M. This kind of reasoning can arise because it is a broadly useful capability (e.g. planning ahead, considering mo
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Frequently asked questions
Where do these risk entries come from?
The MIT AI Risk Repository, which extracts risks from dozens of published frameworks, taxonomies and papers and codes each one by domain and subdomain, and by a causal taxonomy of entity, intent and timing. This is a browseable copy, attributed and openly licensed, not original research.
What do entity, intent and timing mean?
They are the causal coding. Entity is whether a human or the AI system is the cause; intent is whether the harm was intentional or not; timing is whether it arises before or after deployment. Together they let you separate misuse from malfunction.
Can I export the results?
Yes, any filtered set exports as CSV or JSON, and every export carries the upstream source, licence and citation with it, because attribution is a condition of the licence rather than a courtesy.
What is the MIT AI Risk Repository?
A living database of AI risks extracted from published frameworks, taxonomies and papers, classified by a causal taxonomy of entity, intent and timing and by a domain taxonomy of seven domains and 24 subdomains. It is published by the MIT AI Risk Initiative under CC BY 4.0.