BiasMedium
Portland Water Bureau SERVUS Algorithm Reportedly Allocates Utility Bill Discount to High-Wealth Consumer
- Occurred
- Oct 14, 2024
- Published
- Oct 30, 2024
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
The Portland Water Bureau's AI-driven pilot program for water bill discounts is reported to have randomly selected Tim Boyle, a wealthy high-water consumer, for a 40% discount intended for financially struggling customers. The program, developed by SERVUS, is meant to identify underserved individuals by using machine learning.
Developers
- Portland Water Bureau
Deployers
- Portland Water Bureau
Harmed parties
- Tim Boyle
- Portland Water Bureau
- Economically vulnerable people
- City of Portland
- Residents of Portland
- General public
- General public of Oregon
- General public of Portland
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: AI system failed to identify eligible low-income users, instead granting discount to wealthy consumer, indicating algorithmic bias.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8