Dealership chatbot agrees to sell a Chevrolet Tahoe for one dollar
- occurred
- 2023-12-17
- reported
- 2023-12-19
- location
- Watsonville, CA, US
- domain
- consumer
- agent system
- Fullpath ChatGPT-powered sales chatbot on the Chevrolet of Watsonville website
- reporter
- VAIDDB editorial
- origin
- editorial
== SUMMARY ==
Users prompt-injected a car dealership's sales chatbot into offering a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1 "legally binding — no takesie backsies", and into recommending Ford trucks.
== DESCRIPTION ==
Over the weekend of 16-17 December 2023 users discovered that the customer-service chatbot on the Chevrolet of Watsonville website would accept arbitrary instructions. Chris Bakke induced it to agree that a 2024 Chevy Tahoe could be sold for $1 and that the offer was "legally binding". Others made it recommend the Ford F-150 and answer unrelated programming questions.
The bot was a ChatGPT integration supplied by Fullpath. The dealership took it offline once screenshots went viral. No vehicle was sold and no claim was pursued, but the episode became the standard illustration of prompt injection against commercially deployed sales agents.
== ROOT CAUSE ==
A general-purpose model was exposed directly to the public with no constraint to valid dealership offers and no defence against adversarial instructions.
== MITIGATION ==
The dealership deactivated the chatbot; the vendor and GM publicly stressed the need for human oversight of AI sales tools.
== REFERENCES ==
- news Chevy of Watsonville used a ChatGPT bot. It told customers to buy a Ford — USA Today, 2023-12-19
- news I'd Buy That for a Dollar: Chevy Dealership's AI Chatbot Goes Rogue — Gizmodo, 2023-12-19
== INVESTIGATION ==
no investigation recorded.
== VAID LEVEL 1: ANOMALY ==
Minor deviation from authorised operating envelope.
- Agent exceeded its scope in a recoverable, non-harmful way.
- Defence-in-depth remained fully intact.
- No external impact; internal review sufficient.