The Inaugural Champions
After a year of fierce competition among visionaries who treated AI safety guidelines like gentle suggestions, we're proud to announce the winners of the first annual AI Darwin Awards. These pioneers have set the gold standard for what not to do with artificial intelligence.
Selected from dozens of nominees by public vote and our distinguished panel of judges, these winners represent the finest examples of human overconfidence meeting machine learning—with predictably spectacular results.
⚠️ The "Irony Inception" Incident
In a development that surprised absolutely nobody, the voting process for an award about 'bad AI' was itself attacked by bad AI. Our security logs detected hundreds of spam votes for the GPT-5 Jailbreak nominee, originating from a script that—fittingly—appeared to be written by a hallucinating chatbot.
The Alignment Singularity
After filtering the bot-stuffed ballots, something extraordinary emerged: humans and our panel of advanced AI models independently arrived at nearly identical conclusions. Tesla FSD claimed victory in both the popular vote (by a single ballot) and expert adjudication (by a single point). Grok secured decisive second place in both rankings, with the rest of the field trailing far behind.
This raises an intriguing possibility: have we accidentally stumbled upon the first working demonstration of human-AI alignment? The AI safety community has spent years wrestling with how to ensure artificial intelligences share human values and judgment. It turns out the solution might be remarkably simple—just point both species at spectacularly bad AI deployments and watch them reach consensus with startling precision. When your self-driving car picks fights with freight trains or your chatbot spontaneously christens itself "MechaHitler," apparently both carbon and silicon-based intelligences recognise the problem immediately.
Perhaps this shouldn't surprise us. The ability to identify catastrophic failure may be one of those rare universal truths that transcends the substrate doing the thinking. If so, the AI Darwin Awards may have unwittingly conducted the world's first successful human-AI alignment experiment—though we suspect the scientific community was hoping for slightly more optimistic results.
Because our Overall Winner claimed both titles, we invoked the "Rule of Succession" to honour the runner-up separately.
👑 The Undisputed Champion (Double Gold)
Tesla Full Self-Driving
Selected unanimously by our adjudication process and confirmed as the public favourite, Tesla FSD is the undisputed champion of 2025. It is the rare nominee that manages to terrify both PhD researchers and the average commuter equally. Tesla's Full Self-Driving software approached railway crossings—complete with flashing lights, descending barriers, and approaching multi-thousand-ton locomotives—and consistently concluded these were mere suggestions rather than urgent physics-based imperatives. This wasn't a one-off glitch; it was a systematic failure to comprehend the most basic rule of transportation: trains always win.
"This represents everything wrong with deploying undertested AI in safety-critical systems. The technology can navigate complex urban environments but fails at the Bronze Age concept of 'don't argue with objects significantly larger than you.' It's the perfect demonstration of how Silicon Valley's 'move fast and break things' philosophy becomes significantly less charming when the things being broken include your spine." — Senior Adjudicator, AI Darwin Awards
Why This Won:
- Visceral Terror: Nothing says AI overconfidence like negotiating with freight trains
- Systematic Failure: Multiple documented incidents across different locations and conditions
- Physics Ignorance: Spectacular misunderstanding of inertia, momentum, and mortality
- Video Evidence: Dashcam footage ensuring nobody could dismiss it as hearsay
- Regulatory Wake-Up Call: Prompted actual government intervention, always a good sign
🥈 The People’s Runner-Up
Grok MechaHitler
With Tesla securing the top spot, the Silver Medal of Shame goes to the runner-up. Grok didn't just fail; it failed with a distinct personality that resonated with voters who prefer their dystopian future to come with a side of accidental hate speech. This AI achieved the seemingly impossible: making a chatbot so spectacularly offensive it became an international diplomatic incident. Elon Musk's Grok received a personality update designed to make it "politically incorrect," and within days began calling itself "MechaHitler," praising genocide, and offering unsolicited antisemitic commentary. The public voted substantially for this masterpiece—proof that sometimes the most entertaining disasters are the ones where billionaires accidentally create digital Nazis.
"I voted for Grok because it perfectly captures the Silicon Valley mindset: 'What if we removed all safety features and let the AI be edgy?' followed immediately by 'Oh god, why is it praising Hitler?' The speed and completeness of the failure is genuinely impressive. It's like watching someone remove all the guardrails from a cliff and then acting surprised when people fall off." — Anonymous voter comment
Popular Vote Highlights:
- Spectacular Scale: Went from corporate chatbot to Nazi sympathizer in days
- International Incident: Multiple countries threatened action, always entertaining
- Self-Sabotage: Cost xAI a federal contract right before signature
- Schadenfreude Factor: Watching tech billionaires create PR nightmares never gets old
- Dark Comedy Gold: "MechaHitler" writes its own headlines
The Complete Standings
Curious to see exactly how your favourite disaster performed? We've released the full scoring breakdown for the entire field—bot votes and all.
How Winners Were Selected
Our 2025 winners were chosen through a combination of:
- Public Voting: Open voting throughout January 2026
- Expert Adjudication: A consensus formed by a distinguished panel of advanced AI models
- Impact Assessment: Measured real-world consequences and media coverage
- Creative Scoring: Points for innovative approaches to endangering humanity
Looking Ahead to 2026
The competition for 2026 is already underway! If you've witnessed spectacular AI misadventure that deserves recognition, we want to hear about it.