AI Failure Index
AI failures by AI surface
Where the AI shipped, from chatbots and copilots to autonomous systems. The surface is the product form the failure reached production in. Pick a surface to see its record.
- Chatbot203Customer-facing conversational interface. The most cataloged surface.
- Agentic Workflow94Multi-step agent that calls tools, retrieves data, and takes actions. The fastest-growing failure surface.
- Algorithmic Decision70Scoring and eligibility models that decide who gets credit, benefits, bail, or a job. Failures deny at scale and hide behind the score.
- Search / RAG68Retrieval-augmented search and answer surfaces. Failures look like authoritative wrong answers.
- Computer Vision58Image and video recognition: facial recognition, object detection, visual inspection. Failures misidentify people and things with high confidence.
- Copilot45Employee-facing assistant embedded in a productivity surface. Microsoft 365 Copilot, Google Duet, internal builds.
- Voice Agent43Phone or in-product voice surface. Failures travel further because audio is harder to redact after the fact.
- Autonomous System25Vehicles, robots, and other systems that act in the physical world. Failures are kinetic and often irreversible.
- Media Generation23Image, video, and audio generation tools. Failures produce content that crosses legal and safety lines.
- Code Assistant22AI that writes or commits code. Failures land in git history and stay there.
- Recommender16Ranking and recommendation engines that steer what people see, buy, or watch. Failures amplify at feed scale.
- Machine Translation3Automated translation between languages. Failures change what someone said, with legal consequences.