Understanding AI Privacy Risks and Existing Mitigation Strategies from the Perspective of AI Developers in Europe

---

The proliferation of AI has sparked privacy concerns related to training data, model interfaces, downstream applications, and more. We interviewed 25 AI developers based in Europe to understand which privacy threats they believe pose the greatest risk to users, developers, and businesses and what protective strategies, if any, would help to mitigate them. We find that there is little consensus among AI developers on the relative ranking of privacy risks. These differences stem from salient reasoning patterns that often relate to human rather than purely technical factors. Furthermore, while AI developers are aware of proposed mitigation strategies for addressing these risks, they reported minimal real-world adoption. Our findings highlight both gaps and opportunities for empowering AI developers to better address privacy risks in AI.

---

Attribute	Value
Address	Seattle, USA
Authors	Alexandra Klymenko , Stephen Meisenbacher
Citation	Klymenko, A.; Meisenbacher, S.; Kelley, P.G.; Peddinti, S.T.; Thomas, K.; Matthes, F.: 2025. "We are not Future-ready": Understanding AI Privacy Risks and Existing Mitigation Strategies from the Perspective of AI Developers in Europe. In Proceedings of the Twenty-First USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS '25). USENIX Association, USA, Article 7, 113–132.
Key	Kl25f
Research project	Privacy Risks of General-Purpose AI Systems - Stakeholder Perspectives in Europe (PRAISE)
Title	"We are not Future-ready": Understanding AI Privacy Risks and Existing Mitigation Strategies from the Perspective of AI Developers in Europe
Type of publication	Conference
Year	2025
Team members	Alexandra Klymenko , Stephen Meisenbacher
Publication URL	https://www.usenix.org/conference/soups2025/presentation/klymenko
Project	Privacy Risks of General-Purpose AI Systems - Stakeholder Perspectives in Europe (PRAISE)
Acronym	SOUPS