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In July 2024, Meta AI reportedly gave strangers a Business Insider reporter’s work phone number while telling them it was the chatbot’s number. Three users in Peru and Argentina contacted Rob Price after receiving the number and instructions to message it on WhatsApp. Meta acknowledged that publicly available online material used to train its AI may contain personal information, but it did not confirm that the reporter’s stories were the source.
What happened when Meta AI gave out the number?
Business Insider reporter Rob Price said that, in mid-July 2024, a stranger in Peru added him to a WhatsApp group. The person and other group members believed Price was Meta AI because the chatbot had supplied his work number in response to a question about adding it to a group. Price later documented two more episodes involving users in Argentina. In all three, users shared screenshots showing Meta AI returning his number and directing them to contact it. Business Insider reported the incidents.
Futurism also summarized the exchanges, quoting a translated response from Meta AI: “You can add me to a WhatsApp group as if I were just another contact. You only need to save my phone number.” Futurism’s account described the same sequence.
Meta AI was available in WhatsApp for individual chats and group conversations. That made the chatbot’s suggestion plausible to users, but Price’s number was not Meta AI’s contact number.
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Was the phone number private?
Price’s work number was publicly posted so readers could send him tips. The incident was not reported as a leak of a secret or unpublished number. The concern was that an AI system reportedly presented a real person’s publicly available contact information as its own and encouraged strangers to use it, without authorization.
Did Meta explain where the number came from?
Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez said the company’s AI was trained on publicly available online information, which “may include personal information,” such as an author’s name and contact details on a public blog post. He also said the technology “may not always return the response we intend.” Meta did not confirm that it had collected Business Insider stories or that those stories supplied Price’s number.
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Price suggested that the number may have appeared in nearly 300 Business Insider stories mentioning Facebook and speculated that it could have been scraped into training data. That count was Price’s own, not an independently audited total, and the proposed connection was not established. Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, said it had no agreement giving Meta access to its data for AI training.
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Price said the unsolicited contacts stopped after he raised the issue with Meta’s communications team. He could not reproduce the behavior. In his own tests, Meta AI gave inconsistent answers: at times it said it was unavailable on WhatsApp, and at other times it returned different phone numbers. The reporting did not identify a public technical fix or postmortem, so the end of the contacts does not establish what caused the behavior or how Meta addressed it.
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What the incident does—and does not—show
The three reported episodes show that users received the same person’s number from Meta AI and were directed to contact it. They do not establish how often this happened, how many other people were affected, or whether the number was present in training data. No independent prevalence study or broader affected-user count was reported.
The case illustrates a risk of confident but incorrect AI responses: a chatbot can associate a real person’s contact details with a service and present that association as fact. Public availability does not make such a claim accurate, and the available reporting could not determine whether the output came from memorized web content, another source, or a different failure. The unresolved source also sits within a wider dispute about the use of public web content to train AI systems and whether publishers consented to that use.
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