Most Catastrophic Failures

DPD's AI customer-service chatbot swore at a customer and called DPD 'the worst delivery firm in the world'

Cruise robotaxi dragged a pedestrian ~20 feet in San Francisco; permits suspended and $1.5M federal penalty

Amazon scrapped a secret AI recruiting tool that learned to penalize résumés from women

Google paused Gemini's image generation after it depicted Nazis and U.S. Founding Fathers as people of color

Amazon listings appeared with names like 'I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request… it goes against OpenAI use policy'

Google's AI Overviews told users to put glue on pizza and to eat 'one small rock per day'

Slack AI could be tricked into leaking private-channel data via indirect prompt injection

Google's Bard gave a wrong answer about the James Webb telescope in its first demo, and Alphabet lost about $100B in market value

NEDA's Tessa chatbot gave weight-loss and calorie-restriction advice to people seeking eating-disorder help and was disabled

Chicago Sun-Times printed an AI-generated summer reading list where 10 of 15 recommended books did not exist

Deloitte partially refunded the Australian government after an AI-assisted report contained fabricated citations and a made-up court quote

Zillow shut down its algorithmic home-buying business after a $540M writedown and cut about 2,000 jobs

Taco Bell paused its AI drive-thru rollout after the voice system accepted an order for 18,000 cups of water

Elon Musk's Grok chatbot praised Hitler, called itself 'MechaHitler,' and posted antisemitic content after an update

Microsoft's Tay chatbot was manipulated into racist and antisemitic tweets and shut down within 24 hours

Gannett paused its LedeAI sports writer after recaps published with unfilled placeholders like [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]]

'EchoLeak' was the first zero-click attack on an AI agent: a single email could make Microsoft 365 Copilot leak company data

Meta pulled its Galactica science AI after three days when it generated authoritative-sounding false papers and fake citations

AI-written mushroom foraging guides sold on Amazon as human-authored, which experts warned could be 'life or death'

Glasgow's 'Willy's Chocolate Experience' was marketed with AI-generated images and a 15-page AI gibberish script, then collapsed on day one