McDonald's AI hiring chatbot exposed up to 64 million applicants via password '123456'
What happened
Researchers logged into the admin backend of McHire, McDonald's AI hiring chatbot built by Paradox.ai, using the default credentials 123456, then found they could step through applicant records by ID. Names, emails, phone numbers and chat logs for up to 64 million applicants were reachable. Paradox fixed it within hours and said only a handful of records were accessed.
Security researchers Ian Carroll and Sam Curry were looking at McHire, the site where McDonald's job applicants chat with an AI assistant called Olivia built by Paradox.ai. They found a staff login page and got in on their first guesses at a test account using 123456 as both username and password, with no two-factor authentication. From there, an internal interface let them change an applicant ID number to view other people's records, which included names, email addresses, phone numbers and their chat histories with the bot, covering up to 64 million applications.
How it happened
Leaky AI product: App flaw. A security flaw in an AI application, such as broken login or access checks, let someone reach data they should not have seen.
Sources do not say whose AI model was involved. The product was McHire (Olivia), a type of chatbot.
Impact
Data was exposed. Data involved: personal data and chat logs. The impact was confined to one organization and its users or customers. Sources give a figure of 64,000,000.
Severity is rated High, calculated from how far the incident reached and how sensitive the data was.
Was the AI at fault?
No. The failure was in the systems, settings or people around the AI, not in the model's behaviour.
Status and timeline
Confirmed by the affected organization, the AI vendor, a regulator or a named security research firm.
It became public in Jul 2025.
Paradox.ai fixed the problem within hours of the researchers' report on 30 June 2025, said the test account had not been used since 2019, said only a handful of records had been viewed by the researchers, and launched a bug bounty program.