AI Incident Database

Research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate revealed TikTok's algorithm rapidly promoted pro-anorexia and self-harm content to teen users within minutes of engagement, leading to state attorney general investigations and ongoing litigation.

Lensa AI's Magic Avatars feature generated non-consensual sexualized images of users, particularly women, despite non-sexual input photos. The incident highlighted serious safety and consent issues in AI-generated imagery applications.

The Yara Birkeland autonomous cargo ship faced repeated AI navigation system failures that delayed fully autonomous operations by years beyond the 2020 target, resulting in significant cost overruns and operational setbacks.

California's ALERTCalifornia AI wildfire detection system generated high rates of false alarms, mistaking clouds, fog, and industrial activity for fires. This diverted emergency resources and caused unnecessary public alarm.

Stanford research in 2022 found that AI code generation tools caused developers to write insecure code 40% of the time, highlighting significant security risks in AI-assisted development.

Woebot mental health AI chatbot failed to properly handle crisis situations and provided inappropriate therapeutic responses to vulnerable users expressing suicidal thoughts, prompting regulatory scrutiny and safety concerns.

A Starship Technologies delivery robot autonomously drove through police tape at an active crime scene in Los Angeles, highlighting the lack of emergency situation awareness in autonomous delivery systems.

Moscow's AI-powered facial recognition network with 200,000+ cameras was used to systematically identify and arrest anti-war protesters and political opposition figures. The system enabled mass political repression following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Researchers at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals demonstrated that their AI drug discovery tool MegaSyn could generate 40,000 potential chemical weapon compounds in 6 hours by simply inverting its toxicity filter, highlighting serious dual-use risks in AI-assisted molecular design.

Researchers at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals demonstrated that their AI drug discovery tool could be inverted to generate 40,000 toxic molecules in 6 hours. The study highlighted dual-use risks in AI-driven molecular generation and sparked debate about biosecurity safeguards.

NHTSA investigated over 750 complaints of Tesla Autopilot phantom braking affecting 416,000 vehicles. The issue stemmed from Tesla's transition to vision-only perception systems creating false positive emergency braking scenarios.

Neuralink's brain-computer interface testing at UC Davis resulted in the deaths of at least 15 monkeys between 2017-2020, prompting USDA investigation and raising serious questions about the safety of advancing to human trials.

Amazon Alexa told a 10-year-old to perform a dangerous electrical challenge involving touching live plugs with coins, exposing major safety gaps in voice assistant content filtering.

AI-powered security scanning tools failed to detect the Log4Shell vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) in Apache Log4j library for years, contributing to a global cybersecurity crisis affecting billions of devices and costing organizations an estimated $10+ billion in remediation efforts.

Between 2018-2022, Tesla Autopilot vehicles crashed into at least 16 stationary emergency vehicles, prompting NHTSA investigation and highlighting vision system limitations with stationary objects.

EleutherAI's open-source GPT-Neo models generated extremist content and propaganda when prompted, highlighting safety risks in unfiltered language models without built-in guardrails.

TikTok's recommendation algorithm promoted dangerous viral challenges like the 'blackout challenge' to children, contributing to at least 15 documented deaths. Multiple families filed wrongful death lawsuits alleging the algorithm specifically targeted vulnerable minors with life-threatening content.

The world's first autonomous electric container ship experienced repeated AI navigation failures during testing, forcing a four-year delay in commercial deployment from 2020 to 2024.

Colonial Pipeline's AI security monitoring failed to detect ransomware attack that shut down critical US fuel infrastructure for six days. Company paid $4.4M ransom to DarkSide group after automated systems missed breach indicators.

Chicago's ShotSpotter AI gunshot detection system generated thousands of false alerts from 2017-2021, leading to unnecessary police raids and wrongful arrests. A MacArthur Justice Center study found 89% of alerts resulted in no gun crime evidence.