AI Governance Engineer
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Contributing factor

By Updated

A property of a system or its context (autonomy, exposure, reversibility, vulnerable groups, data sensitivity, opacity) that moves the likelihood or severity of a risk without creating it 1. It is captured as registry fields at intake so a policy can compute the tier.

Developed in
ch. 13, Contributing factors and the use-case risk profile
Chapters
ch. 13, Risk Management
Contrast with
Risk source
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

One chapter of the Body of Knowledge uses the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • Risk tier

    An organisation's own rating of an AI use case, computed at intake by a versioned policy from declared profile fields such as autonomy, decision impact…

  • Autonomy

    In the EU AI Act and OECD texts, some degree of independence of action from human involvement, which almost every AI system has.

  • Opacity

    The inability of a person to follow how a system reached an output.

Sources

  1. [1] Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0), NIST AI 100-1 (risk tolerance and residual risk; seven trustworthy characteristics; transparency answers "what happened", explainability "how", interpretability "why"; MAP 1.1 intended purposes; MANAGE 1.1 go/no-go determination; profiles). NIST. 2023-01-26. https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.AI.100-1 (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Contributing factor. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/contributing-factor. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026contributingfactor,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Contributing factor}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/contributing-factor}
}