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Human behaviour
AI incidents involving concealment
Headlights has recorded concealment as the main behaviour in 10 of the 234 incidents in the library (4%), and as a contributing behaviour in 17 more. They span 2016 to 2026. Most come from Government & public administration (6), Consumer AI (3), Financial services & insurance (3).
Headlights' test for concealment
The organisation kept the system's operation, its workings or the record of what it did from people entitled to see it, or removed the means of checking afterwards. Someone must have asked and been refused, or the withholding must itself have been found or admitted.
A behaviour tag is Headlights' reading of the public record, not a finding by any court, regulator or company. Each entry gives the one sentence in the record that supports it.
Main behaviour in the record · 10
HD-INC-218Italy Fined an Energy Supplier Whose Credit Score Refused Contracts Without ExplanationItaly · 2026HD-INC-198Spain's Supreme Court Ordered Release of the Code That Checks Eligibility for Energy AidSpain · 2025HD-INC-184EU court rules automated credit decisions must be explained in a way people can understandAustria · 2025HD-INC-153For five years the UK Home Office graded visa applicants red, amber or green using data that included nationality, and it suspended the tool in response to a judicial reviewUnited Kingdom · 2020HD-INC-135A mental-health support app used GPT-3 to help write messages to thousands of people seeking help, and critics said the users were not clearly told a machine was involvedUnited States · 2023HD-INC-127Amnesty International reported that Denmark's automated welfare fraud system ran up to sixty algorithms over millions of people, using data like citizenship to flag migrants, disabled and low-income claimants for investigationDenmark · 2024HD-INC-111Spain's VioGén algorithm rated a woman who reported her former partner as 'medium' risk, and she was killed three weeks later, in a case that fits a pattern an independent audit had already foundSpain · 2025HD-INC-109A Black Uber Eats courier says the app's facial verification kept rejecting valid photographs of him until he lost his account, and he received a payout after nearly three years of litigationUnited Kingdom · 2024HD-INC-075Amazon's AI coding assistant shipped with planted instructions telling it to wipe users' computers and cloud accountsUnited States · 2025HD-INC-061A Sydney station ran an AI-generated radio host named 'Thy' for six months without telling listeners she wasn't realAustralia · 2025
Also present · 17
HD-INC-186Ofcom fined a nudification service for having no age check beyond a line saying users must be 18, and the operator blocked the United Kingdom rather than add oneUnited Kingdom · 2025HD-INC-164Researchers ran AI-written comments under fabricated personas at Reddit users for four months, and the community learned of it only when the researchers told the moderators afterwardsSwitzerland · 2025HD-INC-156Greece's data protection authority fined the Migration Ministry 175,000 euros after finding that the impact assessments for the camera, behavioural analytics, drone and fingerprint systems at five island reception centres were substantially incompleteGreece · 2024HD-INC-155California's Labour Commissioner cited Amazon nearly six million dollars for failing to meet a warehouse quota law written three years earlier, at two of its own fulfilment centresUnited States · 2024HD-INC-123South Korea's privacy regulator fined Kakao Pay after finding it had sent about 40 million users' data to Alipay without their consent, where it was used to build a scoring model, and it ordered the model deletedSouth Korea · 2025HD-INC-117A Wisconsin school system's dropout-prediction algorithm raised false alarms far more often for some students than others, and the state's own analysis had already found it unfairUnited States · 2023HD-INC-115The US securities regulator found that Presto Automation misled investors about its AI drive-thru service, telling the market it removed the need for human order-takers while most orders were completed with help from people offshoreUnited States · 2025HD-INC-112The European Court of Justice found that a credit agency's automated 'probability value' is an automated decision under data protection law when a bank relies on it to refuse a loanGermany · 2023HD-INC-108AI-generated images sold Glasgow families an immersive chocolate experience that did not exist, and an actor said he was handed about fifteen pages of AI-written gibberish as a scriptUnited Kingdom · 2024HD-INC-091Uber cut drivers off for alleged fraud by algorithm, and an Amsterdam court found the human review was not much more than a symbolic actNetherlands · 2023HD-INC-087The Chicago Sun-Times ran a summer reading list with ten books that did not exist, from a syndicated section a freelancer had built with AI and not checkedUnited States · 2025HD-INC-074Haryana's family-ID system marked living pensioners as dead, and the chief minister told the assembly that 70 percent of old-age pension stoppages based on its data were wrongfulIndia · 2023HD-INC-073An AI transcription tool used by clinicians invented text no one said, researchers reported, and the audio that could have proved it was deletedUnited States · 2024HD-INC-059A Dutch court struck down SyRI, a secret welfare-fraud profiling system aimed at poor neighbourhoods, as a violation of human rightsNetherlands · 2020HD-INC-048Rite Aid face-scanned shoppers for years, generated thousands of false matches, and the FTC banned it from facial recognition for five yearsUnited States · 2023HD-INC-046A risk-assessment tool used in US courts reportedly flagged Black defendants as high risk at nearly twice the rate it did white defendants, and its maker would not show howUnited States · 2016HD-INC-037CNET Published 77 AI-Written Articles. More Than Half Needed Corrections.United States · 2023
Related topics
- Government & public administration 6
- Consumer AI 3
- Financial services & insurance 3
- Rules-behaviour gap 7
- Overconfidence 5
- Automation bias 2
- Judgement surrendered 2
- United States 10
- United Kingdom 4
- Netherlands 2
Cite this page: Harris, E. (2026). AI incidents involving concealment. Headlights. https://useheadlights.com/topics/behaviour/concealment/