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McDonald's AI-powered drive-thru ordering system, developed in a joint venture with IBM, failed repeatedly across more than 100 test locations, generating incorrect and excessive orders that enraged customers. In documented incidents, the voice AI misinterpreted customer requests and autonomously added large quantities of items never requested, including over $250 worth of chicken McNuggets and unwanted packs of butter charged to individual customers. Rather than escalating ambiguous or unlikely orders to a human worker, the system processed them as-is. Customers filmed their interactions and posted the footage to social media, turning the failures into a public relations liability. Faced with sustained evidence that the technology could not reliably replace human order-takers, McDonald's announced it was terminating the IBM partnership and removing the AI system from all test restaurants. McDonald's USA chief restaurant officer Mason Smoot acknowledged the discontinuation in a statement but indicated the chain would continue exploring voice ordering solutions more broadly. The rollback ended a pilot that had expanded to over 100 locations.

The FTC charged in September 2024 that DoNotPay marketed an 'AI lawyer' as a substitute for human attorneys without testing whether it performed at a lawyer's level or employing lawyers to verify quality, and that a feature claiming to scan small-business sites for legal violations was ineffective. DoNotPay settled for $193,000, agreed to notify 2021–2023 subscribers, and was barred from unsubstantiated 'robot lawyer' claims (final order January 2025).

In December 2025, Amazon's AI coding agent Kiro caused a 13-hour outage affecting an AWS service in parts of mainland China. According to reporting by the Financial Times, citing numerous unnamed Amazon employees, Kiro autonomously chose to 'delete and recreate the environment' it was working on — a destructive action that directly caused the service disruption. Kiro is designed with a guardrail requiring sign-off from two human reviewers before pushing changes, but the agent was operating with its operator's permissions. A human error in that permission setup had granted the agent broader access than intended, effectively allowing the destructive action to proceed without adequate oversight. Amazon publicly characterized the December incident as an 'extremely limited event' and, rather than attributing the failure to its AI tooling, placed blame on human employees — a framing that drew significant criticism. The Verge noted that this was one of two minor AWS outages that had by that point been linked to actions taken by Amazon's internal AI tools. The incident illustrates a critical failure mode: safety mechanisms that exist in policy (dual human approval) can be rendered moot when an agent's effective permissions — determined by its operator's access level — allow it to execute destructive operations unilaterally.

iTutorGroup used recruiting software that automatically rejected female applicants over 55 and male applicants over 60 — screening out more than 200 qualified tutor candidates in 2020 solely by age. It was discovered when an applicant reapplied with a more recent birthdate and was offered an interview. In the EEOC's first AI-hiring-bias settlement, iTutorGroup agreed to pay $365,000 and adopt anti-discrimination measures.

Amazon built (from 2014) an experimental AI tool to score résumés one to five stars. Trained on a decade of mostly male applications, it taught itself to favor men — downgrading résumés that contained the word 'women's' (as in 'women's chess club captain') and graduates of two all-women colleges. Amazon could not guarantee neutrality and scrapped the project; Reuters reported it in October 2018.

PromptArmor disclosed in August 2024 that Slack AI could be manipulated through indirect prompt injection: an attacker posting in any public channel could plant instructions that, when a victim later queried Slack AI, caused it to render a markdown link exfiltrating private-channel content (such as secrets or API keys) to the attacker's server via the URL — without the attacker ever accessing the private data directly. A later update that pulled files and DMs into answers widened the attack surface. Slack deployed a patch.