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

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