Incident 329: Amazon Recommended Explosive-Producing Ingredients as “Frequently Bought Together” Items for Chemicals

Description: Amazon was reported to have shown chemical combinations for producing explosives and incendiary devices as “frequently bought together” items via automated recommendation.

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Alleged: Amazon developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Amazon users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
329
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2017-09-18
Editors
Khoa Lam
Potentially deadly bomb ingredients are ‘frequently bought together’ on Amazon
channel4.com · 2017

Channel 4 News has discovered that Amazon’s algorithm guides users to the necessary chemical combinations for producing explosives and incendiary devices. Ingredients which are innocent on their own are suggested for purchase together as “F…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.