New York City: the official bot that advised breaking the law
The city's MyCity chatbot, built to help small businesses navigate regulations, told them employers could take workers' tips, businesses could refuse cash, and landlords could discriminate against voucher holders. All three are illegal. Journalists at The Markup surfaced it; the city kept the bot up for roughly two more years behind beta disclaimers, then a new administration retired it in February 2026, at about $500,000 a year, calling it functionally unusable.
What the verified record says.
- Organizations
- City of New York (MyCity)
- When
- March 2024Resolved February 4, 2026
- Failure class
- Silent wrong output silent-wrong-output
- Discovered by
- Journalists journalist Not caught by the organization running the AI
- Missing control
- Grounded answers. Answers about policy, price, or law pulled from verified documents at answer time, never generated from the model's memory. 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
- Every regulatory answer grounded in the statute text, and a pre-launch accuracy test run by someone whose job is to find the wrong answers.
- Sources
-
- The Markup primary
- Verification
- Adjusted: the incident is real, and details were corrected against the primary source before publication. The decommissioning was announced on January 30, 2026 by a new administration, at a stated cost of about $500,000 a year, and the bot came down on February 4, 2026. Verified against the primary source on August 12, 2026. Published on this site August 13, 2026, updated September 1, 2026.
- What happened next
-
- February 4, 2026 The MyCity chatbot was taken offline, about two years after journalists first showed it advising businesses to break the law.
This record is one of 26 in The receipts, each checked against a primary source before it is published. How the list is built →