SECAI Core · phase 7 of 15 · noun

False positive

In security scanning, a case that is reported when it should not be.

The Explain card

Plain English
A false positive is an alert or finding that gets reported when it should not have been. The scanner says "threat" and there was no threat.
Example
A prompt-injection classifier in front of a coding assistant flags a developer's request to "ignore the deprecated function and use the new one" as an attack. The request was legitimate, but it got blocked and the developer lost ten minutes.
Why it matters
Every false positive costs analyst time and erodes trust in the control. Tune a guardrail too aggressively and people start routing around it, which is worse than having no guardrail at all.
Hook
The smoke alarm that goes off when you make toast.

Word knowledge

How the word is built, where it came from, and what it sits beside in memory.

In a sentence

The prompt firewall scores a retrieval chunk from an OWASP taxonomy page as prompt injection, and the analyst marks the alert as a false positive after reading the source.

Why these words
  • false Old French fals, from Latin falsus, deceived, from fallere, to deceive marks the result as erroneous, the qualifier that reverses the head noun
  • positive Old French positif, from Latin positivus, settled by agreement, from ponere, to place supplies the head noun, the affirming result the qualifier then reverses
Where it came from
Origin
English compound from Latin falsus (deceived, from fallere, to deceive) and Latin positivus (settled, from ponere, to place)
Entered the language
c. 1912
What changed
False had meant erroneous since Middle English. Positive moved from formally laid down, to affirming, then in nineteenth-century laboratory work to indicating presence. Clinicians joined the pair for a serological result that affirms presence in error. Statisticians later aligned it with Type I error, and security writing kept the pair for an erroneous yes from a detector.
How it is spelled
Pattern
false keeps the Latin s of falsus, never a z
Pattern
-tive adjectives from Latin -tivus
Pattern
the open compound stays two words
Breaks the pattern
attributive use often takes a hyphen, as in false-positive rate
Breaks the pattern
false is one syllable; the final e does not lengthen the vowel

Spelled like

  • native
  • relative
  • falsehood
  • falsify
Broken into chunks
  • fals
    • falsehood
    • falsify
    • falsity
  • pos
    • position
    • deposit
    • posture
  • tive
    • native
    • relative
    • sensitive
What it sits beside

Same subject

Same shape

  • false negative
  • true positive
  • false alarm
  • false start

Confusion-matrix labels

  • false negative
  • true positive
  • true negative

False compounds

  • false alarm
  • false negative
  • false start

Detector outcomes

  • true positive
  • false negative

Where it sits in the deck

Phase 7: AI-Specific Runtime Controls: Guardrails, Limits, and Enforcement

Responsible AI principles must be enforced mechanically — learn the runtime controls that constrain model inputs, outputs, and resource consumption.

Neighbours in this phase