Building Resilience to AI's Disruptions to Emergency Response

The following is an excerpt from an article posted on Firehouse.com about a January 2025 tabletop exercise hosted by the Center for AI Policy for public safety officials, federal agencies, and AI experts to examine AI-enabled emergency response disruptions and strategize ways to build resilience against emerging threats. The full article is available here.

False alarms are no fun. Especially in the middle of the night, for the third automatic fire alarm for the shift at the same shopping mall or office complex. You know it’s a false alarm - just like the last two - but the job demands that you respond. That’s the nature of emergency response. Or at least, that’s how things are done today.

What happens when, instead of being plagued by a slew of false alarms on the occasional shift, it’s every shift? What if, instead of one in ten calls being false alarms due to a faulty system, the vast majority of calls were intentionally false, designed to overwhelm emergency response? But if there are 9 fake calls for a structure fire in a row, should you respond to the 10th call? If that call turns out to be legitimate but you opted for a reduced response, what are legal and ethical implications?

False alarms are a tolerated nuisance today, but an emergency response system overwhelmed with AI-generated incidents is a crisis in the making. That’s the tip of the iceberg for what AI can do to disrupt emergency response, and we aren’t ready for it.