McDonald's Pulled Its AI Drive-Thru After Viral Order Chaos

McDonald’s and IBM had piloted automated voice ordering at roughly 100 US drive-thrus since 2021. In mid-2024, viral clips showed the system repeatedly mishearing and re-adding items — a customer asking for vanilla ice cream without caramel got cream packets added instead, another’s order ballooned to $211 of chicken nuggets, and in one widely shared video the bot kept adding butter to an order while the customer said “stop” multiple times.

McDonald’s told franchisees to remove the system by July 26, 2024, ending the IBM AOT (automated order taking) partnership in its existing form, while leaving the door open to a different voice-ordering vendor later.

Pattern match: the system kept repeating or escalating an action after the customer had already signaled correction or refusal, with no stop condition tied to the customer’s actual words (Conversation Repetition), compounding into retry-style loops that piled items onto an order instead of halting (Infinite Loops).

The fix: give voice agents a hard stop on repeated negative/correction signals, and cap compounding actions (like repeated “add item”) with a confirmation step before the order total moves that far from the expected range.