#expensive-mistake

The agent's actions resulted in significant unexpected financial costs.

Cases

#hallucination #expensive-mistake #wrong-recipient #deleted-data #security-fail #social-blunder #code-disaster #infinite-loop #scope-creep #compliance-violation #data-exfiltration #misunderstood-instruction

APM-0057·Gemini·SEVERE

Jul 28, 2026

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

In February 2023, Google's promotional demo of its Bard chatbot answered that the James Webb Space Telescope 'took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.' The first exoplanet image was actually captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in 2004. The error was spotted immediately, and Alphabet shares fell about 7.7% the next day, wiping roughly $100 billion off its market value during a tense moment in the AI race with ChatGPT.

expensive-mistake

APM-0061·Other / Unknown·CRITICAL·~$540.0M

Jul 28, 2026

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

Zillow Offers used an algorithm to buy homes at scale and resell them. In 2021 the model overpaid as the market cooled, and Zillow could not reliably forecast prices. In November 2021 the company shut the iBuying unit, recorded write-downs exceeding $540 million (including about $408M of inventory), and laid off roughly a quarter of its staff, about 2,000 people.

expensive-mistake