Hikers keep getting stranded after consulting AI chatbots for potentially life-saving — or life-threatening — advice.
Just last month, three outdoor enthusiasts had to be rescued by Forest Service rangers in California’s Cascade Range after Google’s AI advised them to “bring far less food and water than their group required,” turning their planned eight-hour ascent into a “multi day ordeal.”
Yet despite officials pleading with the public not to take the advice of hallucinating large language models, their warnings keep falling on deaf ears.
Most recently, a 16-year-old boy had to be rescued from the base of a massive and steep rock formation, ironically named the “Widowmaker,” on British Columbia’s Crown Mountain. As CTV News reports, the teenager took a gondola up to an altitude of over 4,000 feet to the top of Grouse Mountain — only for Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot to lead him off the trail route on his way back down.
