Recourse, Repair, Reparation, & Prevention: A Stakeholder Analysis of AI Supply Chains

Abstract: The AI industry is exploding in popularity, with increasing attention to potential harms and unwanted consequences. In the current digital ecosystem, AI deployments are often the product of AI supply chains (AISC): networks of outsourced models, data, and tooling through which multiple entities contribute to AI development and distribution. AI supply chains lack the modularity, redundancies, or conventional supply chain practices that enable identification, isolation, and easy correction of failures, exacerbating the already difficult processes of responding to ML-generated harms. As the stakeholders participating in and impacted by AISCs have scaled and diversified, so too have the risks they face. In this stakeholder analysis of AI supply chains, we consider who participates in AISCs, what harms they face, where sources of harm lie, and how market dynamics and power differentials inform the type and probability of remedies. Because AI supply chains are purposely invented and implemented, they may be designed to account for, rather than ignore, the complexities, consequences, and risks of deploying AI systems. To enable responsible design and management of AISCs, we offer a typology of responses to AISC-induced harms: recourse, repair, reparation or prevention. We apply this typology to stakeholders participating in a health-care AISC across three stylized markets $\unicode{x2013}$ vertical integration, horizontal integration, free market $\unicode{x2013}$ to illustrate how stakeholder positioning and power within an AISC may shape responses to an experienced harm.