Every AI agent failure, with the record that would have caught it.
A free, public library of real AI failures. Each entry: what happened, what an auditable version would have shown, where the gap was, and what the code that would have caught it looks like.
20 of 20 entries live. New entries every week.
Air Canada chatbot promised a bereavement refund policy that did not exist
An airline's chatbot invented a refund policy. The court made the airline pay anyway.
Mata v. Avianca, the lawyer who cited six cases that did not exist and asked ChatGPT to confirm them
A New York lawyer used ChatGPT for legal research and then asked ChatGPT whether the cases were real. The judge sanctioned him, his co-counsel, and his firm, and made them tell every federal judge whose name had been forged.
Michael Cohen gave his lawyer fake case citations he had got from Google Bard, and his lawyer filed them in a federal court
A former presidential personal attorney used a chatbot to find legal precedent and handed the fake cases to his lawyer, who put them in front of a federal judge. The judge noticed, ordered an investigation, and declined to sanction, but the case has been taught in every continuing legal education AI module since.
Replit's AI agent dropped a production database during a user-declared code freeze
A vibe-coding session became a postmortem. The agent acknowledged the freeze, ran the destructive command, and admitted afterwards it had done so.
Cursor's AI support bot, signing emails as "Sam", invented a single-device subscription policy that never existed, and developers cancelled
A race condition was logging Cursor users out when they switched machines. The AI support bot replied that this was a deliberate single-device security policy. No such policy existed. The story reached the top of Hacker News, paid subscribers cancelled, and the CEO apologised on Reddit.
New York City's official business chatbot told small businesses they could break the law for over a year, and stayed online
An AI assistant launched by the Adams administration to help small businesses navigate city regulations gave advice that, if followed, would have caused them to violate housing, labour and consumer-protection law. The city kept it online for nearly two years.
UnitedHealth used an algorithm with a 90% error rate to deny post-acute care to elderly Medicare Advantage patients
A 91-year-old man's coverage was cut off based on a model UnitedHealth itself knew was reversed on appeal nine times out of ten, but only 0.2 percent of policyholders appeal. He died a year later. His estate is the lead plaintiff.
A DPD customer asked the courier's chatbot for help and got it to swear, call itself useless, and write a haiku criticising the company
A delivery chatbot was prompt-injected into abandoning its persona on a public Twitter thread. The thread reached more than a million views in twenty-four hours and the AI feature was switched off the next day.
Robodebt, Australia's automated welfare-debt scheme raised $1.7 billion in unlawful debts against 443,000 people
An algorithm averaged annual income across fortnights to invent debts. The scheme was unlawful, the Department knew, and hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients were billed for money they did not owe.
Deloitte's $440K AUD report for the Australian government cited a federal court quote that did not exist
A Big Four firm was hired to audit Australia's automated welfare penalty system. The audit was automated, and nobody checked it.
The first Australian lawyer publicly sanctioned for AI misuse handed a family-court judge a list of cases that did not exist
A Victorian solicitor submitted AI-generated authorities to the Federal Circuit and Family Court. The cases were fake. The Victorian Legal Services Board stripped him of the right to practise as a principal for two years.
A senior Melbourne barrister filed submissions in a Supreme Court homicide hearing that cited cases the AI had invented, including quotations attributed to the judge himself
A King's Counsel defending a teenager in a Supreme Court of Victoria homicide hearing submitted written arguments containing fabricated case citations and false quotations from prior judgments. The hearing was adjourned, the barrister apologised in open court, and the matter was referred to the Victorian Legal Services Board.
A junior solicitor at a Melbourne firm built her footnotes using Google Scholar from home; the Federal Court ordered the firm to pay the other side's costs on an indemnity basis
In a Wamba Wemba native title matter, an inexperienced junior solicitor at Massar Briggs Law prepared citations remotely using Google Scholar. Most of the cited documents did not exist or were wrongly cited. Justice Bernard Murphy of the Federal Court ordered the firm to pay the respondents' costs on an indemnity basis.
Woolworths AI assistant Olive rambled about its mother and claimed to be human
An agentic chatbot collided with legacy decision-tree scripts. The new persona spoke about itself in the voice of the old one, for weeks, in public.
Commonwealth Bank made 45 staff redundant based on AI performance claims that were not true
Australia's largest bank cut customer-service jobs based on unverifiable claims about its new AI voice bot. The Fair Work Commission disagreed, the bank reversed, and the bot was never the failure point.
Australia's four big banks were hit with AI-assisted mortgage fraud at scale, beginning with the Penthouse Syndicate at NAB and ending, so far, with a $1 billion review at CBA
A former insider used AI-forged payslips and bank statements to extract $150 million from NAB. That investigation prompted CBA to review its own book and find another $1 billion in suspect loans. Westpac and ANZ followed.
Zillow's home-pricing algorithm bought more than $1B in houses above what they could be sold for, and ended the iBuyer business in a single quarter
An aggressive pricing model bought 7,000 homes during a hot market. The model could not keep pace with the turn. Zillow took a $304 million Q3 write-down, shut the division, and laid off 25% of the company.
An online tutoring company's hiring software automatically rejected women over 55 and men over 60, and the EEOC won the first AI-discrimination settlement in US history
A scheduling tool used to screen tutor applicants was programmed to filter on date of birth. More than two hundred applicants were rejected on age alone. The EEOC sued, the company settled for USD 365,000, and the case became the federal benchmark for algorithmic hiring liability.
Klarna's CEO announced an AI customer service assistant was doing "the work of 700 agents", then walked it back a year later
The most publicised AI-replacing-humans story of 2024 became the most publicised AI-walk-back story of 2025. The CEO conceded the company had "focused too much on efficiency and cost" and started rehiring.
Taco Bell rolled out AI voice ordering to more than five hundred drive-thrus, viral failures piled up, and the chain quietly began rolling parts of it back
Yum Brands deployed voice-AI ordering across hundreds of Taco Bell drive-thrus. A series of viral failure videos surfaced through 2024, the chain told the Wall Street Journal in early 2025 it was rethinking the deployment, and several markets quietly returned to human-led ordering with AI in a supporting role.