A Hybrid FMEA-AHP Framework for Risk Prioritization in Nontransparent Artificial Intelligence Systems

Recent regulation, the EU AI Act and ISO/IEC 42001, requires organizations deploying high-risk artificial intelligence (AI) systems to identify, assess, and document the risks those systems generate, including risks that arise from the opacity of the underlying models. Existing risk-assessment methods leave a gap between checklist-style failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), which is too informal for the new regulatory regime, and full probabilistic risk assessment, which is impractical for opaque deep-learning systems whose component-level failure data are not available. This paper presents a hybrid framework that adapts FMEA to AI failure modes spanning data, model, infrastructure, and ethical dimensions, and uses the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to derive domain-specific criterion weights with an explicit consistency check. A fourth criterion, organizational impact, is added to the conventional severity, occurrence, and detectability triplet to capture the systemic regulatory and reputational consequences that traditional FMEA does not represent. The framework is illustrated on three case studies in healthcare imaging, financial fraud detection, and autonomous vehicle perception, with cross-domain weights elicited under acceptable consistency. A Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis and a cross-method robustness check against TOPSIS, ELECTRE III, and PROMETHEE II indicate that the resulting prioritization is stable both under weight perturbation and under change of aggregation logic. The framework is presented as an auditable governance tool for pre-deployment risk review, not as a replacement for FMEA in domains where it already works, and validation with independent expert panels is identified as the critical next step.