A woman recently asked Amazon Alexa, the company’s voice-activated assistant available through Amazon's Echo and Echo Dot, if it was “connected to the CIA” and tweeted the hilarious exchange.
Twitter user @localbusinessco shared the video on March 8 and thousands of Twitter users have retweeted it as of Friday:
First, the woman asked Alexa if she would lie to her. Alexa responded saying she would never intentionally lie.
Then, she asked Alexa what the CIA is and received a definition in response.
But when asked, “Are you connected to the CIA?” not just once—but twice—Alexa went completely dark.
An Amazon representative told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution the response was a “technical glitch,” which the company has since fixed. Now, Alexa’s response to “Are you connected to the CIA?” should be: “No, I work for Amazon,” according to the representative.
The tweet included the hashtag #Vault7, a reference to WikiLeaks’ claim that the CIA can hack smartphones and other gadgets for surveillance.
In an announcement Tuesday, WikiLeaks released 8,761 “documents and files from an isolated high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) in Langley, Virginia.” It’s the first in a “series” of intelligence leaks comprising the largest intelligence dump in history, according to a previous AJC report.
This story was updated with comment from Amazon.
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