AI Governance Engineer
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Design defect

By Updated

In product liability, a defect inherent in the design of every unit, judged by consumer expectations or by weighing risk against utility 1. For AI: untested operating conditions, a missing guardrail or missing oversight where a safer alternative was reasonably available.

Developed in
ch. 20, Defect types mapped to AI failure modes
Chapters
ch. 20, Existing Law
Contrast with
Manufacturing defect
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.

  • Guardrail

    A runtime control that inspects or mediates a model's or agent's inputs, outputs or tool calls and blocks, rewrites or escalates what breaks a policy, logging…

Sources

  1. [1] "Products liability" (design, manufacturing and marketing defects, incl. failure to warn; consumer-expectation and risk-utility tests). Legal Information Institute, Wex. 2026. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/products_liability (verified: secondary)

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

Cite this term

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

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026designdefect,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Design defect}},
  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/design-defect}
}