Washington State DOL's AI Phone System Reportedly Failed to Provide Spanish-Language Service to Callers Requesting Spanish

February 27, 2026

For months, callers to the Washington State Department of Licensing who selected Spanish received AI-generated English responses spoken with a Spanish accent instead of actual Spanish-language service. This AI incident underscores the need for safe and secure AI practices in providing accessible services. The agency has apologized, acknowledging that staff configuration caused the error, leading to accessibility problems for callers seeking language support. Such incidents emphasize the importance of responsible AI governance and the role of Project Cerebellum's AI incident database in harm prevention.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.671, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.659, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.1 — similarity 0.638, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: washington-state-department-of-licensing, amazon
Alleged developer: amazon
Alleged harmed parties: spanish-language-speakers, general-public-of-washington-state, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1401

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.