LLMMedium
AI Chatbot Reportedly Recommended Herbicide Treatment Linked to Loss of About 25 Acres of Sesame in China
- Occurred
- Jul 10, 2026
- Published
- Aug 9, 2026
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
A 67-year-old farmer in Chuzhou, Anhui, reportedly used an AI-generated weed-and-pest-control plan to spray about 150 mu (25 acres) of sesame by drone. By the next day, the crop had largely withered. Agricultural technicians said the recommended mixture included fomesafen, a herbicide unsuitable for blanket application to sesame. The specific AI product and model have not been publicly confirmed.
Developers
- Large language model developers
- Chatbot developers
Deployers
- Wu (Chuzhou farmer)
- Chatbot users
Harmed parties
- Wu (Chuzhou farmer)
- Farmers in China
- Farmers
- Epistemic integrity
- Chatbot users
Classification
Category confidence: 85%
Severity confidence: 80%
Rationale: AI chatbot provided harmful agricultural advice causing crop loss, fitting LLM failure category with medium severity due to financial loss.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8