Funding the AIID - Part I
Incidents and reports through time, AI Incident Database, 2026
Note: This post is one of several in a new series of posts that will highlight the funding needs and opportunities of the AI Incident Database.
After 8 years of collecting incident data, the AI Incident Database (AIID) is now an official dataset relied upon by central banks, intergovernmental organizations, GRC startups, corporations, consultants, educators, researchers, and the general public alike. Throughout this journey, we've operated on a tight budget doing the detail-oriented and human-centered work of curating AI harm events while building a highly scalable incident content management system.
More recently, however, our costs have begun to climb.
In December our hosting costs spiked as users (and agents?) exceeded the cost-free scaling capacity of our servers. With our architecture, this is an astoundingly large amount of traffic. (In November alone, we transferred enough data to download the complete database nearly 80,000 times.) This is a good problem to have! This surge in demand is a testament to the database's growing importance, and it also signals that we've reached an inflection point.
In short, it is time to secure the future of incidentdatabase.ai and we need your support to do so. This post will focus on sponsorship funding and the burgeoning GRC industry.
⇗Funding Outlook
Having collected, manually annotated, and maintained over 5,000 incident reports, many organizations, researchers, and individuals depend on us to maintain and extend our work. With sustainability in mind, we are now seeking corporate sponsorship, institutional support, and your individual giving.
Incident databases can be funded through various sources: philanthropies, institutional support, individual giving, sponsorship, government support, paid access, advertising, and so on. While we hope to work with various philanthropies to extend the AIID's impact (we do not believe philanthropic funds are well-suited to project maintenance—please contact us if we are wrong!), our funding goal is to secure long-term sustaining funds. We believe the best path to sustainability is partnering with the broader Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) industry.
🏗What Do We Want to Fund?
All contributions to the AIID go to programmatic outputs, including the following:
- Dataset development including ingesting new incidents, new reports, and labeling these with metadata.
- Hosting expenses including the MongoDB instance, API support, and email notifications.
- Practice development including solutions to the challenges surrounding AI incident databasing.
- Codebase maintenance including optimizations for increasing scale, bugfixes, and visual improvements.
- New projects including the development of additional data sources, automated pipelines, spinoff databases covering specific incident types, and agenda-setting incident research.
Are you thinking of donating? Please visit this page. Are you thinking of sponsoring? Please keep reading.
🏋Sponsoring
The AIID does not have a marketing department, but we reached over 400,000 active users in 2025. Our research efforts have informed the development of national and intergovernmental standards, and we are the foundational dataset informing what "AI incident" means. Such a resource requires sustaining funding in addition to project funding. We believe the best path to sustainability is partnering with the broader Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) industry. To that end, the Responsible AI Collaborative is launching a one-year partnership trial with a limited number of independent AI safety and compliance organizations, led by Trustible.ai. The benefits of partnering with the AIID include (1) direct input into the development of the database, (2) early and guaranteed access to incident data and metadata, (3) brand partnership opportunities, and (4) additional benefits.
In sum: we want to help the GRC community thrive through the motivating and convening power of AI incidents and we believe we present the value to make it so. In fact, this is why we are built as a "collaborative" of organizations. See below for metrics and data that prove we can be a part of your GRC company’s growth.
Reach out to sean@raicollab.org to explore being a member of the inaugural cohort of AIID sponsors.
📏Reach Metrics
2025 User numbers continued to grow. The AIID doesn't advertise so all its traffic is 100 percent organic.
The AIID has an excellent organic search ranking in Google. Source: Google Search Console 2025 results for incidentdatabase.ai.
If you search "incidentdatabase.ai" on Google, the entire first page of results are companies buying adwords. (If you are one of these companies, please reach out -- you could sponsor the database directly and people need solutions after they understand the problem demonstrated by incidents.)
Reach out to sean@raicollab.org for additional metrics and to explore being a member of the inaugural cohort of AIID sponsors.
🦾 Support our Efforts
Still reading? Help us change the world for the better!