AI failure vs near miss
But Pieter Arntz, a malware intelligence researcher at security firm Malwarebytes, offered his own take on what those terms likely mean.
“A significant AI failure is one with serious consequences, not simply an incorrect answer. In financial services, that could mean an AI system authorizing substantial fraudulent payments, exposing sensitive customer information, denying customers access to essential financial services, or triggering transactions that threaten market integrity,” Arntz said. “The test should be the scale and severity of the impact, rather than whether the failure looks technically dramatic.”
On the other hand, he added, “An AI near-miss is an event that could realistically have caused serious harm, but was caught before that harm occurred. For example, an AI agent might attempt an unauthorized transfer that a separate approval control blocks, or a prompt-injection attack might induce it to disclose sensitive information, only for an outbound security control to stop the disclosure.”
