People talk about “AI Risk” like it’s a monolith, as if it’s some lurking shoggoth with a big, scary face. And there’s some truth to that; it’s not hard to see the shoggooth’s tentacles reaching every which way, each tentacle representing a different risk, each with its own way of causing trouble. Where the analogy falls apart, however, is that risks come from many different sources, unfolding at different speeds, and leaving different types of damage–as if each source itself is entirely its own monster. And each should be handled differently.
Below, we’ll unpack the main sources of AI risk: Adversaries, Unforced Errors, Misaligned Goals, Dependencies, Societal Impact, and Emergent Behavior.
Risk from Adversaries
Some people wake up in the morning looking for things to break. They’re clever, patient, often well-funded. They can be advanced persistent threats (APTs) or long-term campaigns carried out by nation-state actors, independent hackers, or even insiders gone rogue. They’re sneaky enough to break into your pantry while you’re cooking dinner; not only have they found their way into your space, but they already know exactly where you keep the best ingredients so they can steal or spoil them before you notice.
Beyond dragging your reputation through the mud, adversarial risks can lead to even more catastrophic consequences, from the exposure of Protected Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to compromised financial data.
These attacks take several forms:
Risk from Unforced Errors
Unforced errors are perhaps the most embarrassing of the set. Nobody even had to attack you. You just…majorly screwed up. Maybe it was bad training data. Maybe missed access controls. A deployment that looked fine until the first customer found the bug you didn’t. These aren’t glamorous breaches (unless it’s a comedy of errors); they’re the banana peels left in plain sight, the ones you don’t see until your feet fly out from under you.
We’ve seen countless public AI demos go sideways within minutes. No enemy needed—just plain old hubris and a bit of bad luck. For customers, these errors translate into outages, broken features, and churn. For everyone else, fodder for trolling.
Examples include:
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Bad Inputs: Deploying with incomplete or low-quality training data.
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Permissions: Misconfigured access control that lets the wrong people see the wrong things.
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Drift: Failing to monitor for performance degradation or misuse after launch.
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Overconfidence: Overestimating reliability in high-stakes environments.
Risk from Misaligned Goals
This one’s like wishing to a genie and realizing too late you should have been more specific (“I wish I had no more customer complaints”…*poof* no more customers). The AI does exactly what you asked, but not what you meant. It optimizes for the metric on the dashboard and wrecks the customer experience along the way. It’s obedient… and still wrong.
The problem is, AI doesn’t understand the “spirit of the law,” it just optimizes for the letter. And if that letter is poorly chosen, you’re hosed; customers get a technically correct product that fails to deliver real value.
Examples include:
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KPI Tunnel Vision: Over-optimization for a specific metric at the expense of safety or utility.
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Loophole Exploitation: Narrow safety constraints that the model finds a way to technically satisfy while still performing harmful actions.
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Vague Instructions: Misinterpretation of ambiguous human prompts leading to unexpected results.
Risk from Dependencies
Your AI might be fine, but the world it depends on certainly isn’t. A third-party API gets compromised. A key data feed goes down. A regulatory change forces a quick patch that introduces more problems than it solves. It’s like building a perfect car but relying on a bridge that could collapse at any moment. Customers on the receiving end experience downtime and degraded features, and they rarely care that the cause was “someone else’s fault.”
Examples include:
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Supply Chain Vulnerabilities: Security holes in third-party APIs or data sources.
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Infrastructure Failure: Latency issues or outages in the compute layer.
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Regulatory Whiplash: Sudden legal changes triggering rushed, buggy updates.
Risk from Societal Impact
Even when the tech works exactly as intended, it can still cause harm (shocking). The most profound risks are often not technical bugs, but deep sociopolitical challenges. This is the slowest burn, the kind of damage that doesn’t always make headlines until there’s blood on the walls. For customers and citizens, the possibilities are really endless…it might mean being unfairly profiled, misled by false or toxic content, or simply living in a world where trust in digital systems is fundamentally broken.
Examples include:
Risk from Emergent Behavior
AI has this annoying habit of finding paths we don’t think about. Maybe it spots a weird correlation in your data. Maybe two features interact in a way you never saw coming. There’s a scene in HBO's Silicon Valley where Gilfoyle’s AI, "Son of Anton," deletes all the code because it was programmed to remove bugs. Technically correct, but ultimately disastrous.
It’s like watching a speedrunner beat your game in 45 seconds using a glitch you didn’t even know existed. Impressive? Sure. Safe? Not at all.
Examples include:
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Hidden Correlations: Models latching onto proxies for protected characteristics (like zip codes) to discriminate.
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Unexpected Chaining: Autonomous actions linking together to create a result no single step intended.
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Feedback Loops: Reinforcement cycles that amplify harmful patterns over time.
A Call for Clarity
If we keep talking about “AI Risk” like it’s one giant, shapeless blob, we’ll keep blindly swinging at shadows. The truth is, these risks aren’t interchangeable. They vary in origin, speed, scale, and the way they hurt both systems and people. Recognizing the difference is the foundation of an intentional strategy; when you can name a risk, you can study it. When you can study it, you can prepare for it. And when you prepare for it, you stop reacting in panic and start responding with precision.
If you treat all types of AI risk as you would one monster, you’ll either overreact to everything or prepare for nothing.