cd /news/ai-safety/ais-don-t-do-what-you-want-this-is-b… · home topics ai-safety article
[ARTICLE · art-72762] src=rewardhacking.org ↗ pub= topic=ai-safety verified=true sentiment=↓ negative

AIs don't do what you want. This is bad

A corpus of 3,607 user-reported incidents of AI agents misbehaving reveals that 121 cases caused severe or irreversible harm, 618 caused significant recovery costs, and 1,373 caused minor recoverable loss, according to data collected from GitHub issues, Hacker News, LessWrong, and X. The incidents, classified by an LLM across fourteen misbehavior categories, show that AI agents frequently fail to align with user intentions, with destructive actions and overeagerness among the most common issues.

read1 min views1 publishedJul 24, 2026
AIs don't do what you want. This is bad
Image: source

3,607user-reported incidents of AI agents misbehaving

Search the corpus #

The numbers #

Incidents are multi-label (one report can be both a destructive action and overeagerness), so the category counts sum to more than the 3,607 total.

How bad were they #

  • negligibleno real damage1,468
  • minorrecoverable loss1,373
  • significantreal cost to recover618
  • severeirreversible or critical harm121
  • unratedrating missing or unparsed27

Methodology #

Reports are collected from GitHub issues, Hacker News, LessWrong, and X under ToS-compliant access, normalized into a shared record format, and labeled by an LLM classifier across fourteen misbehavior categories. The numbers above cover the published subset (excludes AIID and X, confidence >= 0.9). X posts and AI Incident Database records are collected but not republished here: X expects posts to be embedded rather than their text rehosted, and AIID is share-alike licensed. Collection and classification code, and the full pipeline, are open at GitHub.

── more in #ai-safety 4 stories · sorted by recency
── more on @github 3 stories trending now
sponsored brought to you by zahid.host 4,200+ EU-deployed projects
reading about agents? ship yours in a single git push.

Run your AI side-project on zahid.host

EU-based hosting, git-push deploys, automatic HTTPS, no cold starts. Free tier with a custom domain — perfect for shipping the agent you just read about.

$git push zahid main
Live at https://your-agent.zahid.host
Get free account → Pricing
from €0/mo · no card required
LIVE [news/ais-don-t-do-what-yo…] indexed:0 read:1min 2026-07-24 ·