The AI Model Risk Catalog: What Developers and Researchers Miss About Real-World AI Harms

We analyzed nearly 460,000 AI model cards from Hugging Face to examine how developers report risks. From these, we extracted around 3,000 unique risk mentions and built the AI Model Risk Catalog. We compared these with risks identified by researchers in the MIT Risk Repository and with real-world incidents from the AI Incident Database. Developers focused on technical issues like bias and safety, while researchers emphasized broader social impacts. Both groups paid little attention to fraud and manipulation, which are common harms arising from how people interact with AI. Our findings show the need for clearer, structured risk reporting that helps developers think about human-interaction and systemic risks early in the design process.

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Publication Details

Journal
Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society
Published
2025-10-15
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1609/aies.v8i3.36702
Primary Topic
Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

The AI Model Risk Catalog: What Developers and Researchers Miss About Real-World AI Harms

Mauro Cherubini, Sanja Šćepanović, Pooja S. B. Rao, Dinesh Babu Jayagopi et al.
Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society
Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
article

The AI Model Risk Catalog: What Developers and Researchers Miss About Real-World AI Harms

Mauro Cherubini, Sanja Šćepanović, Pooja S. B. Rao, Dinesh Babu Jayagopi, Daniele Quercia
article en

Abstract

We analyzed nearly 460,000 AI model cards from Hugging Face to examine how developers report risks. From these, we extracted around 3,000 unique risk mentions and built the AI Model Risk Catalog. We compared these with risks identified by researchers in the MIT Risk Repository and with real-world incidents from the AI Incident Database. Developers focused on technical issues like bias and safety, while researchers emphasized broader social impacts. Both groups paid little attention to fraud and manipulation, which are common harms arising from how people interact with AI. Our findings show the need for clearer, structured risk reporting that helps developers think about human-interaction and systemic risks early in the design process.

Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI Ethics and SocietyVol. 8(3)
Politecnico di Torino (IT), International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IN), Nokia (Finland) (FI), University of Lausanne (CH)
Openalex Percentile: Top 71%
Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
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