Risks to privacy
AI Risk"General- purpose AI systems can cause or contribute to violations of user privacy. Violations can occur inadvertently during the training or usage of AI systems, for example through unauthorised processing of personal data or leaking health records used in training. But violations can also happen deliberately through the use of general- purpose AI by malicious actors; for example, if they use AI to infer private...
Overview
A source-backed snapshot of this AI risk.
"General- purpose AI systems can cause or contribute to violations of user privacy. Violations can occur inadvertently during the training or usage of AI systems, for example through unauthorised processing of personal data or leaking health records used in training. But violations can also happen deliberately through the use of general- purpose AI by malicious actors; for example, if they use AI to infer private facts or violate security."
Risk profile
How the MIT AI Risk Repository categorizes this risk.
Merged risk records
Source records unified into this canonical risk concept.
MITRISK-Bengio2025-60.03.05 - Risks to privacy
"General- purpose AI systems can cause or contribute to violations of user privacy. Violations can occur inadvertently during the training or usage of AI systems, for example through unauthorised processing of personal data or leaking health records used in training. But violations can also happen deliberately through the use of general- purpose AI by malicious actors; for example, if they use AI to infer private facts or violate security."
MITRISK-Bengio2024-49.03.05 - Risks to privacy
"General- purpose AI models or systems can ‘leak’ information about individuals whose data was used in training. For future models trained on sensitive personal data like health or financial data, this may lead to particularly serious privacy leaks. General- purpose AI models could enhance privacy abuse. For instance, Large Language Models might facilitate more efficient and effective search for sensitive data (for example, on internet text or in breached data leaks), and also enable users to infer sensitive information about individuals."
Mitigations
Defenses that may help with related attacks.
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Source evidence
Research source for this risk, when available.
Included resource
International AI Safety Report 2025
Original source
MIT AI Risk Repository
Open the public repository used for AI risk records and taxonomy fields.
