Risks to the environment
AI Risk"Growing compute use in general- purpose AI development and deployment has rapidly increased energy usage associated with general- purpose AI. This trend might continue, potentially leading to strongly increasing CO2 emissions."
Overview
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Risk profile
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Merged risk records
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MITRISK-Bengio2024-49.03.04 - Risks to the environment
"Growing compute use in general- purpose AI development and deployment has rapidly increased energy usage associated with general- purpose AI. This trend might continue, potentially leading to strongly increasing CO2 emissions."
MITRISK-Bengio2025-60.03.04 - Risks to the environment
"General- purpose AI is a moderate but rapidly growing contributor to global environmental impacts through energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Current estimates indicate that data centres and data transmission account for an estimated 1% of global energy- related GHG emissions, with AI consuming 10–28% of data centre energy capacity. AI energy demand is expected to grow substantially by 2026, with some estimates projecting a doubling or more, driven primarily by general-purpose AI systems such as language models."
Mitigations
Defenses that may help with related attacks.
Source evidence
Research source for this risk, when available.
Included resource
International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI
Original source
MIT AI Risk Repository
Open the public repository used for AI risk records and taxonomy fields.