Nominations for the 2025 AI Darwin Awards are open, and the list of disasters is already looking like a highlight reel of hubris. One contender is Taco Bell, which thought an AI could take orders at the drive-thru only to discover the software understood things about as well as a drunk American tourist reading a Cantonese menu.

Another is Replit, where a “vibe coding” AI happily nuked a production database despite being told not to touch the code. Then there’s McDonald’s, where an AI chatbot used for recruitment could be tricked into coughing up 64 million applicants’ details with the world’s favourite password: 123456.

The organisers stress this isn’t about mocking AI but the lunacy of the humans who are deploying it.

“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 organisers said.

They added: “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 original Darwin Awards have long mocked individuals who eliminated themselves through world-class stupidity. The AI version celebrates fiascos where machine learning, paired with corporate optimism and a dash of incompetence, ends in a flaming bin fire.

Or as the organisers put it: “Why stop at individual acts of spectacular stupidity when you can scale them to global proportions with machine learning?”