Who Gives A Crap: the agent that defended a typo
A subscription brand sent an email with a pricing typo. When a customer wrote in to question it, the company's AI support agent confirmed the inflated price as real and apologized for any confusion, instead of catching the error or handing it to a person. The real increase was a few dollars; the typo made it look like the price had more than doubled. The company took the agent offline the same day and sent a correction. The agent had nothing checking its answers against the company's own price list, so it defended the mistake rather than flagging it.
What the verified record says.
- Organizations
- Who Gives A Crap
- When
- July 2026
- 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
- Ground support-agent answers in the canonical price table, not in the correspondence being asked about.
- Sources
-
- SmartCompany primary
- Verification
- Adjusted: the incident is real, and details were corrected against the primary source before publication. Not a doubled price. A roll-count typo showed 24 rolls at the new price on a 48-roll subscription, so a real increase from $66 to $69.50 looked like more than double, and the agent confirmed the wrong higher figure instead of catching it. Incident date July 13, 2026. Verified against the primary source on August 25, 2026. Published on this site August 26, 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 →