AI Chatbot Reportedly Recommended Herbicide Treatment Linked to Loss of About 25 Acres of Sesame in China

July 10, 2026

A farmer in Chuzhou, Anhui, used an AI-generated weed-and-pest-control plan to spray sesame by drone. The recommended mixture included fomesafen, a herbicide unsuitable for blanket application to sesame. … through contributors—JOIN US—to learn more.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
wu-(chuzhou-farmer), chatbot-users
Alleged developer
large-language-model-developers, chatbot-developers
Alleged harmed parties
wu-(chuzhou-farmer), farmers-in-china, farmers, epistemic-integrity, chatbot-users

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1654

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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