Governance
AI Incident
An AI incident is an event in which an AI system causes or contributes to harm — physical, financial, reputational, or discriminatory — or behaves in a materially unexpected way that could cause harm. Incident response for AI systems follows the same triage-contain-investigate-remediate pattern as cybersecurity incidents, with additional steps for model rollback and retraining.
The AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai) catalogs thousands of real-world AI incidents and is the standard reference for organizations building AI incident playbooks. The EU AI Act requires serious incident reporting to national market surveillance authorities for high-risk AI systems within 15 days.
Related terms
- AI Governance — AI governance is the system of policies, controls, and accountabilities that determines what AI is allowed to do inside an organization, who approves AI deployments, how AI decisions are audited, and how risk is managed.
- AI Risk — AI risk is the set of categorized hazards a deployment introduces — including hallucination, bias, data leakage, prompt injection, regulatory non-compliance, vendor lock-in, and unintended automation of harm.
- Responsible AI — Responsible AI is an umbrella term for the operational practices that make AI deployments safe, fair, transparent, accountable, and aligned with human values — covering ethics, governance, security, privacy, and reliability across the full lifecycle.
- EU AI Act — The EU AI Act is the world's first comprehensive legal framework for artificial intelligence, adopted in 2024 and phased in through 2027.