How to get involved

Submit AI incidents

Anyone can upload an incident to the database. On the website ( incidentdatabase.ai), click the Submit button in the top-left corner, which will take you to three different options. The first is a quick form to upload a single URL to the database; it doesn’t ask for any additional data, so you won’t get credit for your submission. The second option is a larger form, which asks for more detail about the incident and does give you credit. There’s also a third option to import via CSV format for anyone with a large batch of incidents to share.

You should first check to see if the incident you’re suggesting is already listed on the database and make sure it fits the criteria, which is loosely any intelligent system that’s failed or at risk of failure. That said, if you’re unsure an example qualifies, submit it anyway – the team would rather see the incident than not, and exploring what constitutes an “AI incident” is part of the project.

Discover AI incidents

To look for examples of AI incidents, click Discover at the top left of the website. There, you can search the full text of incident reports for key terms, such as by technology (facial recognition, driverless cars), how it’s used (policing, HR) or for wider issues (racism, bias). The results will show the headline of the article about the incident and you can click through to find out more.

Once you’ve found an incident you want to read more about, you can search for all of the submitted articles about it. For example, incident #1 on the database is about YouTube cracking down on unsuitable videos being algorithmically shown to children. There are 14 different information sources about that single incident, so you don’t need to rely on a single report.

Get involved in open source

The database is open source, with development efforts hosted on GitHub ( There, anyone can add changes to fix problems with the database or the website, as well as add a new data summary or contribute to the new taxonomy. Plus, you can build your own application that uses the data.