AI Governance Engineer
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Near miss

By Updated

A hazard that a control, or luck, interrupted before harm occurred: the guardrail blocked the exfiltration, the reviewer caught the invented dosage. Near-miss data is evidence; the GPAI Code of Practice asks providers to report connected near-miss patterns with serious incidents 1.

Developed in
ch. 17, Incident, hazard, issue and serious incident
Chapters
ch. 17, Incidents
Contrast with
AI hazard
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

3 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

Patterns that use this term

3 pattern pages use the term, most mentions first.

  • AI incident

    In the OECD's definition, an event or series of events where the development, use or malfunction of one or more AI systems directly or indirectly leads to…

  • Issue (versus incident)

    A defect, deviation or control weakness that has not produced a harmful event, such as an eval regression in staging or a drift alert.

  • Serious incident

    Under AI Act Article 3(49), an incident or malfunction of an AI system that directly or indirectly leads to (a) a death or serious harm to health, (b) serious…

  • Widespread infringement

    Under AI Act Article 3(61), an act or omission contrary to Union law protecting individuals' interests that harms, or is likely to harm, the collective…

  • GPAI

    General-purpose AI model: under the AI Act, a model that shows significant generality, can competently perform a wide range of distinct tasks and can be…

  • GPAI Code of Practice

    The voluntary instrument (published 10 July 2025) that general-purpose-AI providers use to demonstrate compliance with their AI Act obligations until…

  • 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] General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, Safety and Security chapter (Commitment 9, serious incident reporting, Measure 9.2; Appendix 1.4 specified systemic risks, incl. loss of control). European Commission. 2025-07-10. https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/118119 (verified: primary)

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

Cite this term

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

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026nearmiss,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Near miss}},
  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/near-miss}
}