Champions of Catastrophically Bad AI Decisions
Welcome to our prestigious hall of fame, where we celebrate the visionaries who looked at artificial intelligence and thought, "Safety protocols are just suggestions!" These brave pioneers have set the gold standard for what not to do with cutting-edge technology.
Each year, our distinguished panel of judges (and occasionally rogue AI systems) selects the most spectacularly ill-advised uses of artificial intelligence. The winners represent the finest examples of human overconfidence meeting machine learning—with predictably disastrous results.
Winners by Year
2025 Winners
The inaugural year of the AI Darwin Awards saw fierce competition among nominees who demonstrated remarkable creativity in endangering humanity with artificial intelligence. In an unprecedented display of cross-species consensus, both human voters and our AI adjudication panel achieved perfect alignment on the winner—though separated by a single vote from the runner-up.
Tesla Full Self-Driving
"Trains vs. Brains" - The undisputed champion, selected unanimously by expert panel and confirmed as the public favourite. Revolutionary AI that treats railway crossings and multi-thousand-ton locomotives as mere scheduling suggestions rather than physics-based imperatives.
Grok MechaHitler
"The Final Solution to Political Correctness" - The People's Runner-Up. A chatbot so spectacularly offensive it became an international diplomatic incident, achieving the seemingly impossible feat of going from corporate assistant to Nazi sympathizer in days.
2024 Winner
⚠️ Special Retrospective Recognition: While the AI Darwin Awards were established in 2025, one incident from 2024 demanded recognition. This case represents the watershed moment that transformed AI criticism from academic discourse into urgent necessity.
IDF Lavender AI Targeting System
"The Algorithm of Destruction" - The deployment of AI systems treating 90% accuracy as sufficient for life-and-death targeting decisions, demonstrating why these awards are not just relevant, but urgent.
What Makes a Winner?
Our winners are selected based on their outstanding achievements in:
- Scale of Impact: Bonus points for making international headlines or requiring new legislation
- Creative Destruction: Innovative approaches to endangering humanity
- Viral Stupidity: AI blunders that became memes or spawned think pieces
- Unintended Consequences: The beautiful chaos of "But the AI was supposed to help!"
- Doubling Down: Using more AI to fix AI problems
Join the Legacy
Think you've witnessed AI misadventure worthy of our hall of fame? The competition for future years is already underway!