Harm at five levels
Five harm levels from one person to the environment, each with an example harm from the atlas and the control, by stack layer, that catches it.
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Five levels at which harm lands, with one example per level from the harms atlas. Individual: harm to one person, their rights, money, liberty, autonomy or body; for example discrimination in consequential decisions, caught by the Eval Gate in CI (Layer 03 Evals & Red Teaming as Evidence). Group: harm that falls on a group or community as such, not only on its members one by one; for example exclusion through under-representation in data, caught by Model Card as Control Evidence (Layer 02 Inventory & Transparency). Organisation: risk to the organisation that builds, buys or deploys the system; for example security compromise through prompt injection, caught by the Runtime Guardrail (Layer 04 Runtime Controls & Observability). Society: harm to shared systems such as information, elections, work, equality and essential services; for example job displacement and task transformation, caught by a workforce impact assessment (Layer 01 Govern-as-Code). Environment: harm to the physical environment from building and running AI systems; for example energy demand and emissions of training and inference, caught by energy and emissions telemetry (Layer 05 Assurance & Continuous Compliance). The harms atlas holds every harm with real incident records, the failure mode an engineer can test for, the control that catches it and the evidence that control leaves.
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“Harm at five levels” by Jorge García Aibar, aigovernanceengineer.com (https://aigovernanceengineer.com/figures/harm-levels), v0.5.0. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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<a href="https://aigovernanceengineer.com/figures/harm-levels">Harm at five levels</a> by Jorge García Aibar,
aigovernanceengineer.com, v0.5.0.
Licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>.
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*[Harm at five levels](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/figures/harm-levels) by Jorge García Aibar, aigovernanceengineer.com, v0.5.0. Licensed under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).*