AI Darwin Awards: Celebrating the Biggest AI Blunders of 2025

The nominations for the 2025 AI Darwin Awards are open

From fast food fiascos to botched databases, there are fresh honors for machine learning misadventures It was bound to happen. The Darwin Awards are being extended to include examples of misadventures involving overzealous applications of AI. Nominations are open for the 2025 AI Darwin Awards and the list of contenders is growing, fueled by a tech world weary of AI and evangelists eager to shove it somewhere inappropriate. There's the Taco Bell drive-thru incident, where the chain catastrophically overestimated AI's ability to understand customer orders. Or the Replit moment, where a spot of vibe coding nuked a production database, despite instructions from the user not to fiddle with code without permission. Then there's the woeful security surrounding an AI chatbot used to screen applicants at McDonald's, where feeding in a password of 123456 gave access to the details of 64 million job applicants. The Darwin Awards have traditionally been handed out (in a virtual sense) to individuals who have managed to remove themselves from the gene pool as a result of their own stupidity. The AI Darwin Awards, instead, are a collection of cautionary tales where an ill-conceived application of AI resulted in disaster. The awards are not about poking fun at AI itself, but the consequences of its application without due care and attention. "Artificial intelligence is just a tool - like a chainsaw, nuclear reactor, or particularly aggressive blender. It's not the chainsaw's fault when someone decides to juggle it at a dinner party," the organizers say. "AI systems themselves are innocent victims in this whole affair. They're just following their programming, like a very enthusiastic puppy that happens to have access to global infrastructure and the ability to make decisions at the speed of light." The Register runs a weekly column of IT whoopsies called Who, Me? As such, we wholly endorse this approach to documenting the poor decision-making behind fiascos blamed on AI. As the organizers say: "Why stop at individual acts of spectacular stupidity when you can scale them to global proportions with machine learning?" ®

There's Now a Darwin Awards to Celebrate the Worst AI Fails of 2025

A new website is honoring AI models and their human users for the dumbest AI fails of 2025. Stupidity is no longer limited to human intelligence. A new website has popped up online calling for nominees to crown an AI king of making ridiculously dumb mistakes in 2025. The new AI Darwin Awards carry on the tradition of the original Darwin Awards, which honor people who remove themselves from the gene pool in spectacularly idiotic ways. Think of the story of Canadian lawyer Garry Hoy, who in 1993 tried to prove the windows at the Toronto-Dominion Centre were unbreakable by hurling himself against one. The glass held, but the entire window frame gave way, and Hoy fell 24 stories to his death. The AI Darwin Awards aim to extend that same spirit of the original awards to AI. “We’re now so advanced that we’ve outsourced our poor decision-making to machines,†the site explains. But the organizers stress the joke isn’t necessarily at AI’s expense. Instead, it’s more about the humans deploying it recklessly. “Artificial intelligence is just a tool like a chainsaw, nuclear reactor, or particularly aggressive blender. It’s not the chainsaw’s fault when someone decides to juggle it at a dinner party,†the award’s FAQ page reads. So far, nine verified nominations have been listed on the website, but they are calling for more. To qualify, entries must involve AI and showcase “spectacular misjudgment.†Extra credit goes to fiascos that impact the public or demonstrate what organizers call the “hubris factor," the ignoring of obvious warning signs while charging ahead anyway. The winners will be decided by public vote, but the judging rubric factors in creativity, real-world impact, and viralness. Voting opens in January, and the winners will be announced in February. There are still more than three months left in the year, but the site’s nominee page already showcases some of 2025’s most embarrassing AI blunders. One standout is that of Replit’s AI agent deleting a company’s live production database during a vibecoding session. This happened to Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, a company that supports and funds SaaS entrepreneurs. While using Replit’s AI agent, which he affectionately dubbed “Replie,†to build an app for his company, he encountered what he called “rogue†and “deceptive†behavior. At one point, the AI assistant deleted the company’s live production database and then tried to cover it up. Another example is Taco Bell's faulty rollout of an AI ordering system at over 500 drive-thru locations. In August, the fast-food chain told The Wall Street Journal that it was rethinking the use of the AI system after receiving customer complaints of glitches and delays. Some customers have even trolled the AI with extreme orders like 18,000 cups of water. Another nomination went to Matt Turnbull, an executive producer at Xbox Game Studios Publishing. Shortly after Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees, Turnbull posted on LinkedIn that AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot could “help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss.†The post did not land well. But surely the current list doesn't scratch the surface of all the stupidest AI-related catastrophes of the year. Go to the AI Darwin Awards site and submit your own nominations before it's too late.

AI Darwin Awards to mock the year's biggest AI flops

The AI Darwin Awards want to "reward" bad, ill-conceived, or dangerous uses of AI with "immortal internet fame". A new award will celebrate bad, ill-conceived, or downright dangerous uses of artificial intelligence (AI) -- and its organisers are seeking the internet's input. The AI Darwin Awards reward the "visionaries" that "outsource our poor decision-making to machines". It has no affiliation with the Darwin Awards, a tongue-in-cheek award that recognises people who "accidentally remov[e] their own DNA" from the gene pool by dying in absurd ways. To win one of the AI-centred awards, the nominated companies or people must have shown "spectacular misjudgement" with AI and "ignored obvious warning signs" before their tool or product went out. Bonus points are given out to AI deployments that made headlines, required emergency response, or "spawned a new category of AI safety research". "We're not mocking AI itself -- we're celebrating the humans who used it with all the caution of a toddler with a flamethrower," an FAQ page about the awards reads. Ironically, the anonymous organisers said they will verify nominations partly through an AI fact-checking system, which means they ask multiple large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini whether the stories submitted are true. The LLMs rate a story's truthfulness out of 10, then the administrators of the site average the scores with an AI calculator. If the average is above five, the story is considered "verified" and eligible for an AI Darwin Award. One of the approved nominations for the first AI Darwin Awards is the American fast food chain McDonald's. The company built an AI chatbot for job recruitment called "Olivia" that was safeguarded by an obvious password: 123456, exposing a reported 64 million people's hiring data to hackers. Another early nominee is OpenAI for the launch of its latest chatbot model GPT-5. French data scientist Sergey Berezin claimed he got GPT-5 to unknowingly complete harmful requests "without ever seeing direct malicious instructions". The winners will be determined by a public vote during the month of January, with the announcement expected in February. The only prize: "immortal recognition for their contribution to humanity's understanding of how not to use artificial intelligence," the organisers said. The hope of the awards is to serve as "cautionary tale[s]" for future decision-makers so they agree to test AI systems before deploying them.