Meta AI Support Bot Reportedly Enabled Takeovers of High-Profile Instagram Accounts

May 31, 2026

Recent reports claim hackers manipulated Meta's AI support chatbot to change email information of high-profile Instagram accounts, resulting in account takeovers. Alleged targets included the Barack Obama White House, Chief Master Sergeant John F. Bentivegna of the Space Force, Sephora, and app researcher Jane Manchun Wong. Meta confirmed resolution of the issue.

Explore the complexities of AI governance within the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM — JOIN US to learn more about AI incident prevention and guardrails for trustworthy AI development.

Alleged deployer

meta, instagram, hackers

Alleged developer

meta, chatbot-developers, large-language-model-developers

Alleged harmed parties

meta-users, instagram-users, jane-manchun-wong, sephora, john-f.-bentivegna, barack-obama, barack-obama-white-house-instagram-account, privacy

AI governance case studies

For forensic AI governance failure analysis (TAIMScore™ case studies), browse Human Signal’s Failure Files™.

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.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.