In Quest of an Extensible Multi-Level Harm Taxonomy for Adversarial AI: Heart of Security, Ethical Risk Scoring and Resilience Analytics

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive, structured, and expandable taxonomy of harms in AI, grounded in ethical theories, enabling precise analysis, ethical reasoning, and safety evaluation of sociotechnical systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, multi-level harm taxonomy with 66+ harm types, formalizes victim entities and harm attributes, and aligns with ethical theories for rigorous AI safety assessment.

Findings

Identifies 66+ harm types organized into two domains and eleven categories.

Formalizes harm attributes like reversibility and duration affecting severity.

Provides a framework for operationalizing harm analysis in AI safety and ethics.

Abstract

Harm is invoked everywhere from cybersecurity, ethics, risk analysis, to adversarial AI, yet there exists no systematic or agreed upon list of harms, and the concept itself is rarely defined with the precision required for serious analysis. Current discourse relies on vague, under specified notions of harm, rendering nuanced, structured, and qualitative assessment effectively impossible. This paper challenges that gap directly. We introduce a structured and expandable taxonomy of harms, grounded in an ensemble of contemporary ethical theories, that makes harm explicit, enumerable, and analytically tractable. The proposed framework identifies 66+ distinct harm types, systematically organized into two overarching domains human and nonhuman, and eleven major categories, each explicitly aligned with eleven dominant ethical theories. While extensible by design, the upper levels are intentionally stable. Beyond classification, we introduce a theory-aware taxonomy of victim entities and formalize normative harm attributes, including reversibility and duration that materially alter ethical severity. Together, these contributions transform harm from a rhetorical placeholder into an operational object of analysis, enabling rigorous ethical reasoning and long term safety evaluation of AI systems and other sociotechnical domains where harm is a first order concern.