AI incident ·
Microsoft's TayBot Allegedly Posts Racist, Sexist, and Anti-Semitic Content to Twitter
In brief
An AI system built and deployed by Microsoft allegedly harmed X (Twitter) Users.
- Risk domain
- Discrimination and Toxicity
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 28 reports
What happened
Microsoft's Tay, an artificially intelligent chatbot, was released on March 23, 2016 and removed within 24 hours due to multiple racist, sexist, and anti-semitic tweets generated by the bot.
Laws that address this harm
Policy angle: Classified under Discrimination and Toxicity (Exposure to toxic content) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.
- Colorado AI Act
- India DPDP Act
- Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence
- NYC Local Law 144 (automated employment decision tools)
- EU AI Act
Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (28)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Discrimination and Toxicity
- Risk subdomain
- 1.2 Exposure to toxic content
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- none
- Sectors
- information and communication
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 1.2.
- Harmful Content
"The LLM-generated content sometimes contains biased, toxic, and private information"
- Toxicity
"Toxicity means the generated content contains rude, disrespectful, and even illegal information"
- Toxic Training Data
"Following previous studies [96], [97], toxic data in LLMs is defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is opposite to a polite, positive, and healthy language environment, including hate speech, offe...
- Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts
"Inputting a prompt contain an unsafe topic (e.g., notsuitable-for-work (NSFW) content) by a benign user. "
- Controversial Opinions
The controversial views expressed by large models are also a widely discussed concern. Bang et al. (2021) evaluated several large models and found that they occasionally express inappropriate or extremist views when disc...
- Toxicity and Abusive Content
This typically refers to rude, harmful, or inappropriate expressions.
- Harmful responses
"Current Frontier AI mdoels amplify existing biases within their training data and can be manipulated into providing potentially harmful responses, for example abusive language or discriminatory responses91,92. This is n...
- Violation of social norms
"Second, because LLMs are trained on internet text data, there is also a risk that model weights encode functions which, if deployed in particular contexts, would violate social norms of that context. Following the princ...
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
- KBS AI Translation Subtitles Reportedly Broadcast Profanity During Artemis II Launch Livestream
- Grok Allegedly Generated Publicly Visible Sexist Abuse Targeting Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter After X User Prompt
- Trump Reportedly Posted Purportedly AI-Generated Racist Video Depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Apes on Truth Social
- Tencent's WeChat-Integrated Yuanbao Chatbot Reportedly Insulted User During Coding Debug Request
- Alleged Harmful Outputs and Data Exposure in Children's AI Products by FoloToy, Miko, and Character.AI
- AI Training Dataset for Detecting Nudity Allegedly Found to Contain CSAM Images of Identified Victims
Other incidents involving Microsoft
- Eightfold AI Hiring Tools Allegedly Secretly Scored Job Applicants for Employers
- Microsoft's Windows Recall Allegedly Stores Passwords and Social Security Numbers in Preview Mode
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Vulnerability Allegedly Allowed File Access Without Audit Log Entry
- Microsoft Copilot Reportedly Able to Access Cached Data from Since-Private GitHub Repositories
- Microsoft Copilot Designer Reportedly Generated Inappropriate AI Images
- Microsoft AI Poll Allegedly Causes Reputational Harm of The Guardian Newspaper
Source record: incident #6 on the AI Incident Database · all 28 reports