DPD: the chatbot that swore at a customer
A customer trying to find a missing parcel coaxed the delivery firm's support bot into swearing, writing a poem about a useless chatbot, and calling its own company the worst delivery firm in the world. The screenshots drew 800,000 views inside a day. DPD blamed an update deployed the day before and disabled the AI element immediately. An update changed behavior, no test caught it, and a customer ran the regression suite in public.
What the verified record says.
- Organizations
- DPD
- When
- January 2024
- Failure class
- Silent wrong output silent-wrong-output
- Discovered by
- A customer customer Not caught by the organization running the AI
- Missing control
- Output validation. Rule-based checks that parse what the model produced before a customer sees it. Full definition and the other incidents in this group → Watch this kind of control catch a planted failure → A recorded run of a certificate gate refusing a bad document →
- What would have caught it
- A regression test on the customer-facing bot after every update, run before the update ships rather than by a customer in public.
- Sources
-
- The Guardian primary
- Verification
- Confirmed: the claims held as first researched. Verified against the primary source on August 12, 2026. Published on this site August 13, 2026, updated September 1, 2026.
This record is one of 26 in The receipts, each checked against a primary source before it is published. How the list is built →