Kevin Paeth

Lukas Bieringer, Sean McGregor, Nicole Nichols et al.

AI systems face a growing number of AI security threats that are increasingly exploited in the real world. Hence, shared AI incident reporting practices are emerging in industry as best practice and as mandated by regulatory requirements. Although non-AI cybersecurity and non-security AI reporting have progressed as industrial and policy norms, existing collections of practices do not meet the specific requirements posed by AI security reporting. we argue that established processes are not well aligned with AI security reporting due to fundamental shortcomings for the distinctive characteristics of AI systems. Some of these shortcomings are immediately addressable, while others remain unresolved technically or within social systems, like the treatment of IP or the ownership of a vulnerability. Based on this position, we examine the limitations of current AI security incident reporting proposals. We conclude that the advent of AI agents will further reinforce the need to advance specialized AI security incident reporting.

Kevin Paeth, Daniel Atherton, Nikiforos Pittaras et al.

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly deployed across the world, they are also increasingly implicated in AI incidents - harm events to individuals and society. As a result, industry, civil society, and governments worldwide are developing best practices and regulations for monitoring and analyzing AI incidents. The AI Incident Database (AIID) is a project that catalogs AI incidents and supports further research by providing a platform to classify incidents for different operational and research-oriented goals. This study reviews the AIID's dataset of 750+ AI incidents and two independent taxonomies applied to these incidents to identify common challenges to indexing and analyzing AI incidents. We find that certain patterns of AI incidents present structural ambiguities that challenge incident databasing and explore how epistemic uncertainty in AI incident reporting is unavoidable. We therefore report mitigations to make incident processes more robust to uncertainty related to cause, extent of harm, severity, or technical details of implicated systems. With these findings, we discuss how to develop future AI incident reporting practices.

Sean McGregor, Kevin Paeth, Khoa Lam

Two years after publicly launching the AI Incident Database (AIID) as a collection of harms or near harms produced by AI in the world, a backlog of "issues" that do not meet its incident ingestion criteria have accumulated in its review queue. Despite not passing the database's current criteria for incidents, these issues advance human understanding of where AI presents the potential for harm. Similar to databases in aviation and computer security, the AIID proposes to adopt a two-tiered system for indexing AI incidents (i.e., a harm or near harm event) and issues (i.e., a risk of a harm event). Further, as some machine learning-based systems will sometimes produce a large number of incidents, the notion of an incident "variant" is introduced. These proposed changes mark the transition of the AIID to a new version in response to lessons learned from editing 2,000+ incident reports and additional reports that fall under the new category of "issue."