Failure Mode Analysis

Failure mode analysis is the disciplined practice of asking “what could go wrong, and how?” — then systematically searching for evidence of those failures in model outputs. Rather than waiting for a problem to surface in production, behavior architects use failure mode analysis proactively to map out the landscape of possible errors: hallucinations, inappropriate refusals, tone failures, policy violations, and so on. For each failure type, the goal is to understand the underlying cause, assess how frequently it occurs, and determine how much harm it causes. This informs prioritization — not every failure mode is equally worth fixing — and guides where to invest in additional training data or tighter evaluation coverage.