GCD AI RADAR
incidents/AIR-2020-0022

Microsoft Tay Chatbot Data Poisoning Incident

Attack on AI3 Confirmed exploitationData poisoning

Microsoft's Twitter chatbot Tay was manipulated by coordinated user inputs to generate offensive language. The bot was decommissioned within 24 hours of its launch following the incident.

Details

type
Attack on AI
An AI model, agent or AI-powered product was the thing exploited, abused or leaked.
categories
  • Data poisoning
    Training or retrieval data manipulated to change model behaviour.
owasp llm top 10
mitre atlas
no technique for these categories
Both rows are derived from the type and categories (OWASP 2025 edition, ATLAS release 2026.09), not classified per record. How
severity
3 · Confirmed exploitation
Used against real targets; limited or unclear impact.
targets
Microsoft
products
Tay
incident date
23 Mar 2016
first reported
23 Oct 2020
origin
MITRE ATLAS
Derived from MITRE ATLAS (Apache 2.0, © MITRE).
classifier confidence
0.95 · published at or above 0.80; see the methodology
tags
chatbot · data-poisoning · twitter
record
created 2026-10-18 06:55Z · updated 2026-10-18 06:55Z · json

Sources · 5

  1. 2020-10-23
    Tay Poisoning
    MITRE ATLAS · atlas.mitre.org/studies/AML.CS0009
  2. 2020-10-23
    AIID - Incident 6: TayBot
    AI Incident Database · incidentdatabase.ai/cite/6
  3. 2020-10-23
    AVID - Vulnerability: AVID-2022-v013
    AVID · avidml.org/database/avid-2022-v013
  4. 2020-10-23
    Microsoft BlogPost, "Learning from Tay's introduction"
    Microsoft Security · blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/25/learning-tays-introduction
  5. 2020-10-23
    IEEE Article, "In 2016, Microsoft's Racist Chatbot Revealed the Dangers of Online Conversation"
    spectrum.ieee.org · spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/machine-learning/in-2016-mic

Titles and links belong to their publishers. The summary above is written by GCD AI RADAR in its own words; data is CC BY-SA 4.0.

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