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Good practice Imported

MyGOV's AI Chatbot — A Malaysian Government Rollback After Nonsense Answers

Malaysia · Cyberjaya · See the Malaysia profile · See the Cyberjaya profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 100% 7/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Malaysia's National Digital Department soft-launched an AI chatbot inside the MyGOV super-app covering 34 public services in August 2025. Within days it misnamed the Communications Minister and misdated live subsidy schemes; officials quietly disabled it rather than explain the f

34
Government services bundled under the chatbot
MyGOV's AI Chatbot — A Malaysian Government Rollback After Nonsense Answers

Details

Maturity
Discontinued
Promoter
National Digital Department (Jabatan Digital Negara), Ministry of Digital, Malaysia
Period
August 2025
Keywords
digital government, citizen services, generative AI, incident response

Context

Malaysia's National Digital Department (Jabatan Digital Negara), under the Ministry of Digital, soft-launched the MyGOV super-app with an integrated AI chatbot on 20 August 2025, bundling access to 34 government services under one assistant meant to answer citizens' questions about entitlements and procedures.

Objectives

The chatbot aimed to give citizens a single conversational interface across 34 public services.

Activities

Within the same week, tech outlet SoyaCincau and Malay Mail documented the chatbot giving incorrect answers to basic factual questions.

Results

It named Gobind Singh Deo, not Datuk Fahmi Fadzil, as Communications Minister; misdescribed Fahmi Fadzil's background; failed to identify the Ministry of Digital's own Secretary-General; got the designer of the national flag wrong; and told users that the RM100 SARA cash aid and a reduced RON95 petrol price 'have commenced since 1 July 2022' — years before either policy existed.

Conclusions

Rather than issue a public correction, the department quietly disabled the chatbot; by the time journalists checked back, the chat box had been replaced with an 'Akan Datang' ('Coming soon') placeholder, with no formal statement explaining the rollback. The episode is a documented, source-verified example of premature generative-AI deployment in a citizen-facing government channel: real factual harms from a live government product, followed by a rollback handled with minimal public accountability.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Short (< 1 year)
Staffing & skills
National Digital Department (Jabatan Digital Negara), Ministry of Digital, Malaysia

Common failure modes

  • Chatbot produced multiple documented factual errors (wrong minister, wrong flag designer, wrong subsidy dates) within days of launch
  • The department disabled the tool without any public statement or acknowledgement of the failure
  • No pre-launch fact-verification or accuracy testing evident before the soft launch

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

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