03On the record
Named companies · sourced figures
The analyses on this site are anonymized composites. These are not. Each of these is a named company, a documented event, and a sourced set of figures — the same failure patterns, on the record. This is the overheated end of the scale — companies that went all in; the frozen end lives in The Freeze.
9 on file · Q2 ’26
IPO: Tokyo, Oct 2024 · Delisted Aug 2025
~90% fictitious (court finding)
A Tokyo AI developer rode its branding to a 2024 IPO. Within a year it had collapsed on accounting-fraud findings — up to 90% of its reported sales, a court later found, were fictitious.
Peak valuation, reported: $1.5B · Raised ~$445–500M
~300% overstated (reported)
A startup sold an AI that would build most of your app, and raised on that story to a reported $1.5 billion valuation. When the cash was seized, what remained looked more like a large engineering team than an autonomous one.
700
agent-equivalent · two-thirds of chats
Humans
rehiring · “lower quality,” said the CEO
In February 2024 Klarna said its AI assistant did the work of 700 agents. Fifteen months later its CEO said cost had crowded out quality — and the company started hiring humans back.
The judge put to ChatGPT
“Is an autistic minor exonerated from paying fees for their therapies?”
The Constitutional Court, 2024
Judges must not over-rely on AI — it “could compromise the right to due process and the judiciary’s independence and integrity.”
A judge put legal questions to ChatGPT and folded the answers into a ruling on a sick child’s rights. It became Latin America’s landmark case — not of a company failing, but of a court reining AI in.
The chatbot said
Claim the bereavement fare retroactively, within 90 days of ticket issuance.
The linked policy said
Bereavement fares cannot be claimed once travel is completed.
C$812
The award
Precedent
The actual cost
Negligent misrepresentation
A grieving passenger followed the airline’s chatbot. Its advice contradicted the airline’s own policy — and a tribunal ruled the airline owned the words.
~90%
support “replaced” (founder’s claim)
~85%
cost cut (founder’s claim)
~23
actual layoffs, done Sep 2022 (later account)
Self-reported metrics, partly contradicted afterward.
The founder announced he’d replaced 90% of support with a chatbot and cut resolution costs 85%. The numbers were his own — and the story got more complicated the more he explained it.
Allowed
generative AI opened to staff
Banned
after source-code leaks to ChatGPT
Weeks after letting engineers use ChatGPT, Samsung banned generative AI on company devices — staff had pasted confidential source code into it. An all-in that opened and closed in about three weeks.
€2.6M
Garante fine · Jul 2021
~19,000
riders under the system
0
routes to human review
Solely-automated decisions, no Article 22 safeguards.
A rider-management algorithm decided who got work — and gave riders no way to reach a human, state their case, or contest it. Italy’s regulator called that missing appeal the violation.
₩103M
PIPC fine · first AI case
9.4B
KakaoTalk messages used
600k
people, without consent
Training-data provenance treated as a deployment liability.
Korea’s “Lee Luda” chatbot was trained on 9.4 billion private KakaoTalk messages its users never agreed to hand over. The regulator’s fine was the first time the country’s privacy law reached an AI.
Compiled from public filings, court records, company statements and reputable press. Figures are attributed to their sources; allegations are labeled as such. Not legal or investment advice.
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