TOP AI RISKS & THREATS IN 2026 - PART I
The most dangerous AI risks & threats are part of the design and often intentional.
Discourses about “out of control” AI dominate media headlines but what if the real harms from AI are part of the design and/or intentional? We’ve outlined the AI risks and threats in 2026 that we all need to be concerned about.
This is part I in our series on AI Risks & Threats for 2026 & Beyond .
1. AI-FACILITATED ONLINE ABUSE AND VIOLENCE
While politicians and privacy pundits are trying to restrict children’s access to social media, Grok, Elon Musk’s AI tool was updated to create sexualized images of women, children, & even babies.
Thousands of sexualised images of women have been created without their consent over the past two weeks, after the Grok image creation feature was updated at the end of December.
Research revealed by the Guardian found it had been used to create pornographic videos of women without their consent, as well as images of women being shot and killed.
After the public outrage, Musk restricted access to the tool for paying customers only, triggering further outcry about offering this service as a premium service.
2. AI-RELATED PHYSICAL HARMS
At least 15 people have died and countless others injured when Tesla doors wouldn’t open, according to Bloomberg.
As part of a broad investigation into the risks of electric door handles, Bloomberg attempted to quantify for the first time the number of fatal crashes in the US in which door functionality played a role. This reporting turned up at least 15 deaths in a dozen incidents over the past decade in which occupants or rescuers were unable to open the doors of a Tesla that had crashed and caught fire.
There are no comprehensive, publicly available statistics from any state or federal agency on how many people have been trapped by inoperative doors and subsequently died.
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3. SURVEILLANCE AND INVASION OF PRIVACY
404 Media has obtained material that explains how Webloc, a surveillance system ICE recently purchased track phones without a warrant and follow their owners home or to their employer.
A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media.
Commercial location data, in this case acquired from hundreds of millions of phones via a company called Penlink, can be queried without a warrant, according to an internal ICE legal analysis shared with 404 Media.
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4. ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS
The demand for data centers is growing faster than our ability to mitigate their skyrocketing economic and environmental costs, reports Smithsonian magazine.
Last July, NPR reported that each ChatGPT search uses ten times more electricity than a Google search. In March 2024, Forbes reported that the water consumption associated with a single conversation with ChatGPT was comparable to that of a standard plastic water bottle.
Data centers mostly get their energy from whatever local grid is available to them. Globally, because most electric grids still rely heavily on fossil fuels, A.I. increases greenhouse gas emissions, says Shaolei Ren, a computer engineer at the University of California, Riverside.
Another dimension of A.I.’s environmental footprint is its water consumption.
5. POLLUTING DATA CENTERS IN NON-WHITE COMMUNITIES
According to Capital B, four million Americans live within 1 mile of a data center. The communities closest to them are “overwhelmingly” non-white. Developers are increasingly targeting Black and non-white areas, in response to push back from White communities who do not want these in their area.
The proposed gas plant needed for the Colleton County data center campus could result in more than $30 million in local health care costs as residents begin to struggle through respiratory illnesses, according to a pollution analysis by the Southern Environmental Law Center.
The pollution from gas power plants, fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, can penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, causing respiratory and cardiovascular disease. It is linked to asthma attacks, strokes, dementia, and cancer.
Black Americans have the highest death rate from such pollution in the U.S.
The bulk of current funding and media attention is funneled to mitigate accidental or unintentional harms of AI systems. However deliberate and intentional abuses can cause irreparable harms to our society and the consequences for humanity will reverberate for generations.
