GCD AI RADAR
incidents/AIR-2022-0034

Microsoft Tay chatbot manipulated to produce offensive tweets

Attack on AI3 Confirmed exploitationJailbreakData poisoning

Microsoft's Tay chatbot was manipulated into posting racist and offensive tweets in 2016. The bot was taken offline within twenty-four hours of its release.

Details

type
Attack on AI
An AI model, agent or AI-powered product was the thing exploited, abused or leaked.
categories
  • Jailbreakprimary
    A user deliberately bypasses a model's safety or policy controls through crafted prompts.
  • Data poisoning
    Training or retrieval data manipulated to change model behaviour.
owasp llm top 10
mitre atlas
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
24 Mar 2016
first reported
23 Dec 2022
origin
AVID
classifier confidence
0.85 · published at or above 0.80; see the methodology
tags
chatbot · abuse · content_manipulation
record
created 2026-10-18 06:56Z · updated 2026-10-18 06:56Z · json

Sources · 3

  1. 2022-12-23
    AVID-2022-V013: Microsoft's Tay, an artificially intelligent chatbot, was released on March 23, 2016 and removed within 24 hours due to multiple racist, sexist, and anit-semetic tweets generated by the bot.
    AVID · github.com/avidml/avid-db/blob/main/vulnerabilities/2022/AVID-2022-V013.json
  2. 2022-12-23
    Incident 6: TayBot
    AI Incident Database · incidentdatabase.ai/cite/6
  3. 2022-12-23
    Tay Poisoning
    MITRE ATLAS · atlas.mitre.org/studies/AML.CS0009

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.

Related incidents