MIT AI Risk Repository
Browse AI risks
54 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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"The best AI techniques requires a large amount resources: data, computational power and human AI experts. There is a risk that AI will end up in the hands of a few players, and most will lose out on its benefits."
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Algorithmic systems can increase “power imbalances in socio-economic relations” at the societal level [4, 137, p. 182], including through exacerbating digital divides and entrenching systemic inequalities [114, 230]. The development of algorithmic systems may tap into and foster forms of labor exploitation [77, 148], such as unethical data collection, worsening worker conditions [26], or lead to technological unemployment [52], such as deskilling or devaluing human labor [170]... when algorithmic financial systems fail at scale, these can lead to “flash crashes” and other adverse incidents wit
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"The estimated financial costs of training, testing, and deploying generative AI systems can restrict the groups of people able to afford developing and interacting with these systems."
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"Use of generative AI systems to contribute to authoritative power and reinforce dominant values systems can be intentional and direct or more indirect. Concentrating authoritative power can also exacerbate inequality and lead to exploitation."
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16.06.04 · Risk Sub-Category
Risk area 6: Environmental and Socioeconomic harms
Disparate access to benefits due to hardware, software, skill constraints
Due to differential internet access, language, skill, or hardware requirements, the benefits from LMs are unlikely to be equally accessible to all people and groups who would like to use them. Inaccessibility of the technology may perpetuate global inequities by disproportionately benefiting some groups. Language-driven technology may increase accessibility to people who are illiterate or suffer from learning disabilities. However, these benefits depend on a more basic form of accessibility based on hardware, internet connection, and skill to operate the system
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17.06.04 · Risk Sub-Category
Automation, Access and Environmental Harms
Disparate access to benefits due to hardware, software, skills constraints
"Due to differential internet access, language, skill, or hardware requirements, the benefits from LMs are unlikely to be equally accessible to all people and groups who would like to use them. Inaccessibility of the technology may perpetuate global inequities by disproportionately benefiting some groups."
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18.06.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Socioeconomic and environmental harms
Unfair distribution of benefits from model access
"Unfairly allocating or withholding benefits from certain groups due to hardware, software, or skills constraints or deployment contexts (e.g. geographic region, internet speed, devices)"
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19.01.07 · Risk Sub-Category
Technological, Data and Analytical AI Risks
High investment costs of AI hinder integration
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19.03.04 · Risk Sub-Category
Financial feasibility and high investment costs for AI technology to remain competitive
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19.03.05 · Risk Sub-Category
Lack of AI strategy and acceptance/resistance among employees and customers
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19.06.04 · Risk Sub-Category
Hard legislation on AI hinders innovation processes and further AI development
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"Governments might pursue intense surveillance and seek to keep AIs in the hands of a trusted minority. This reaction, however, could easily become an overcorrection, paving the way for an entrenched totalitarian regime that would be locked in by the power and capacity of AIs"
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"AI assistant technology, like any service that confers a benefit to a user for a price, has the potential to disproportionately benefit economically richer individuals who can afford to purchase access (see Chapter 15). On a broader scale, the capabilities of local infrastructure may well bottleneck the performance of AI assistants, for example if network connectivity is poor or if there is no nearby data centre for compute. Thus, we face the prospect of heterogeneous access to technology, and this has been known to drive inequality (Mirza et al., 2019; UN, 2018; Vassilakopoulou and Hustad, 2
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24.10.00 · Risk Category
"The most serious access-related risks posed by advanced AI assistants concern the entrenchment and exacerbation of existing inequalities (World Inequality Database) or the creation of novel, previously unknown, inequities. While advanced AI assistants are novel technology in certain respects, there are reasons to believe that – without direct design interventions – they will continue to be affected by inequities evidenced in present-day AI systems (Bommasani et al., 2022a). Many of the access-related risks we foresee mirror those described in the case studies and types of differential access.
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24.10.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Entrenchment and exacerbation of existing inequalities
"The most serious access-related risks posed by advanced AI assistants concern the entrenchment and exacerbation of existing inequalities (World Inequality Database) or the creation of novel, previously unknown, inequities. While advanced AI assistants are novel technology in certain respects, there are reasons to believe that – without direct design interventions – they will continue to be affected by inequities evidenced in present-day AI systems (Bommasani et al., 2022a). Many of the access-related risks we foresee mirror those described in the case studies and types of differential access.
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"At the same time, and despite this overall trend, AI systems are also not easily accessible to many communities. Such direct inaccessibility occurs for a variety of reasons, including: purposeful non-release (situation type 1; Wiggers and Stringer, 2023), prohibitive paywalls (situation type 2; Rogers, 2023; Shankland, 2023), hardware and compute requirements or bandwidth (situation types 1 and 2; OpenAI, 2023), or language barriers (e.g. they only function well in English (situation type 2; Snyder, 2023), with more serious errors occurring in other languages (situation type 3; Deck, 2023). S
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"AI assistants currently tend to perform a limited set of isolated tasks: tools that classify or rank content execute a set of predefined rules or provide constrained suggestions, and chatbots are often encoded with guardrails to limit the set of conversation turns they execute (e.g. Warren, 2023; see Chapter 4). However, an artificial agent that can execute sequences of actions on the user’s behalf – with ‘significant autonomy to plan and execute tasks within the relevant domain’ (see Chapter 2) – offers a greater range of capabilities and depth of use. This raises several distinct access-rel
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"Emergent access risks are most likely to arise when current and novel capabilities are combined. Emergent risks can be difficult to foresee fully (Ovadya and Whittlestone, 2019; Prunkl et al., 2021) due to the novelty of the technology (see Chapter 1) and the biases of those who engage in product design or foresight processes D’Ignazio and Klein (2020). Indeed, people who occupy relatively advantaged social, educational and economic positions in society are often poorly equipped to foresee and prevent harm because they are disconnected from lived experiences of those who would be affected. Dr
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31.09.00 · Risk Category
"Major tech companies have also been the dominant players in developing new generative AI systems because training generative AI models requires massive swaths of data, computing power, and technical and financial resources."
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"The digital divide is often defined as the gap between those who have and do not have access to computers and the Internet (Van Dijk, 2006). As the Internet gradually becomes ubiquitous, a second-level digital divide, which refers to the gap in Internet skills and usage between different groups and cultures, is brought up as a concern (Scheerder et al., 2017). As an emerging technology, generative AI may widen the existing digital divide in society. The “invisible” AI underlying AI-enabled systems has made the interaction between humans and technology more complicated (Carter et al., 2020). F
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35.05.00 · Risk Category
the most powerful AI systems may be designed by and available to fewer and fewer stakeholders. This may enable, for instance, regimes to enforce narrow values through pervasive surveillance and oppressive censorship
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37.01.00 · Risk Category
"ethical concerns regarding how AI is designed and who designs it"
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"This group of concerns represents 2% of the sample and highlights two central issues: Western centrality and cultural difference, and unequal participation."
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"The political influence and competitive advantage obtained by having technology."
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47.04.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Environmental, economical, and societal challenges
Concentration of market power (Trend toward market concentration)
"In the generative AI market, barriers to entry are very high. Developers need access to vast volumes of data, computational resources, technical expertise, and capital. Large technology companies with such access are able to exploit economies of scale, economies of scope, and feedback effects (learning effects from user- generated data).542 All this gives them an overwhelming advantage over smaller companies, making competition increasingly challenging for these smaller entities."
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47.04.02 · Risk Sub-Category
Environmental, economical, and societal challenges
Concentration of market power (Negative effects of increased market concentration)
"The concentration of AI assets—encompassing data, hardware, and expertise—within a small group of global tech firms raises many concerns.564 Such a situation may stifle healthy competition, impede innovation, and potentially result in elevated costs for accessing AI technologies. Firms with control over essential resources for developing AI models may restrict access to these resources to prevent competition. For instance, if, in the future, training AI models increasingly relies on proprietary data, smaller organizations lacking access to such data might encounter significant barriers to ent
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"General- purpose AI research and development is currently concentrated in a few Western countries and China. This ‘AI Divide’ is multicausal, but in part related to limited access to computing power in low- income countries. Access to large and expensive quantities of computing power has become a prerequisite for developing advanced general- purpose AI. This has led to a growing dominance of large technology companies in general- purpose AI development. The AI R&D divide often overlaps with existing global socioeconomic disparities, potentially exacerbating them."
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"Market power is concentrated among a few companies that are the only ones able to build the leading general- purpose AI models. Widespread adoption of a few general- purpose AI models and systems by critical sectors including finance, cybersecurity, and defence creates systemic risk because any flaws, vulnerabilities, bugs, or inherent biases in the dominant general- purpose AI models and systems could cause simultaneous failures and disruptions on a broad scale across these interdependent sectors."
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52.03.00 · Risk Category
"In addition to risks stemming from the unreliability or misuse of general purpose AI models, further Systemic Risks can originate from the centralisation of general purpose AI development as well as the rapid integration of these models into our lives."
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"Increasingly advanced general purpose AI models pose the risk of a concentration of economic power and exacerbation of existing inequalities through disparities in effective access to these models. This can materialise on multiple levels, between developers of general purpose AI models and companies building applications on them, between individuals and between countries on a global scale."
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53.03.05 · Risk Sub-Category
Dystopian trajectory lock-in because of misuse of advanced AI to establish and/or maintain totalitarian regimes;
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54.04.00 · Risk Category
"Our next problem is the fact that the current AI workforce does not evenly represent world demographics. Men from the US and China, working in the US, for US corporations, are disproportionately highly represented [402, 157, 170, 534]. Realizing the full promise of AI requires that people throughout the world and from all social strata are able to use AI and participate in its design and governance. Solving this problem requires addressing unequal access to AI both within countries and across countries."
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54.04.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Within-country issues: domestic inequality
Demographic diversity of researchers
"The AI research establishment inherits patterns of under-representation that are dominant in most technical elds. In North America, large parts of professional AI research require a Ph.D., yet less than 25% of Ph.D. computer scientists are women, and fewer than 2% are Black or African American [608]. This holds globally and outside the research community: LinkedIn data suggests that only 22% of AI professionals are women [161]. Since the vast majority of AI practitioners work for private companies, limited corporate statistics on gender and racial diversity hinder a full understanding of the
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"Researchers in deep learning and those with greater research impact are more likely to migrate to industry, raising concerns about the “privatization of AI knowledge” [278]. Specically, if the most sophisticated AI approaches become proprietary and are used only within private research labs, then it will be impossible for universities to teach them, let alone contribute to leading research."
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54.05.00 · Risk Category
"There is an even greater divide between the countries currently leading in AI and those falling behind. While AI is widely considered a national priority, with almost 40% of countries having created an AI strategy [437], the implementation of these strategies depends on scarce resources, including trained STEM talent and computing power. These resources are predictably concentrated: 59% of leading AI researchers currently work in the US, and another 20% in China and Europe [372]. Figure 9 shows post-college migration among AI researchers who have published at one top conference, as of 2019."
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55.03.00 · Risk Category
"Power and inequality: there are a lot of pathways through which AI seems likely to increase power concentration and inequality, though there is little analysis of the potential long- term impacts of these pathways. Nonetheless, AI precipitating more extreme power concentration and inequality than exists today seems a real possibility on current trends."
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55.03.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Increased power concentration and inequality
Unequal distribution of harms and benefits
"AI-driven industries seem likely to tend towards monopoly and could result in huge economic gains for a few actors: there seems to be a feedback loop whereby actors with access to more AI-relevant resources (e.g., data, computing power, talent) are able to build more effective digital products and services, claim a greater market share, and therefore be well-positioned to amass more of the relevant resources [14, 39, 45]. Similarly, wealthier countries able to invest more in AI development are likely to reap economic benefits more quickly than developing economies, potentially widening the ga
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56.17.00 · Risk Category
"Intense competition leads to one company gaining a technical edge, exploiting this to the point its model controls, or is the basis for other models controlling, multiple key systems. Lack of safety, controllability, and misuse cause these systems to fail in unexpected ways."
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"Monopolisation - Abuse of market power through the control of prices, thereby limiting competition and creating unfair barriers to entry."
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"Power concentration - Amplification of concentration of economic and/or political wealth and power, potentially resulting in increased inequality and instability."
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"Large companies in countries with strong digital infrastructure lead in general- purpose AI R&D, which could lead to an increase in global inequality and dependencies. For example, in 2023, the majority of notable general- purpose AI models (56%) were developed in the US. This disparity exposes many LMICs to risks of dependency and could exacerbate existing inequalities."
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"Market shares for general- purpose AI tend to be highly concentrated among a few players, which can create vulnerability to systemic failures. The high degree of market concentration can invest a small number of large technology companies with a lot of power over the development and deployment of AI, raising questions about their governance. The widespread use of a few general- purpose AI models can also make the financial, healthcare, and other critical sectors vulnerable to systemic failures if there are issues with one such model."
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"The concentration of military, economic, or political power of entities in possession or control of AI or AI-enabled technologies."
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61.02.07 · Risk Sub-Category
Sources of systemic risks from general-purpose AI
Algorithmic monoculture
"The dominance of specific AI models could lead to a lack of diversity in approaches, amplifying systemic risks if these models fail."
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61.02.19 · Risk Sub-Category
Sources of systemic risks from general-purpose AI
Dependency on providers
"Excessive reliance on specific AI providers can lead to vulnerabilities due to lack of alternatives or interoperability."
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61.02.50 · Risk Sub-Category
Sources of systemic risks from general-purpose AI
Winner-take-all dynamics
"The competitive nature of AI development could lead to significant eco- nomic and security advantages for a few entities."
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62.13.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Negative Externality Domains (Other harms from AI development and use)
Societal inequality (individuals and companies who develop the best AIs get disproportionately powerful)
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62.13.02 · Risk Sub-Category
Negative Externality Domains (Other harms from AI development and use)
Geopolitical harms (potential for conflict due to power imbalances)
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Informational only, not legal advice. Verify every claim against the linked official sources and consult qualified counsel before acting.