Amazon's newly launched artificial intelligence chatbot Amazon Q is “experiencing severe hallucinations and leaking confidential data,” internal documents warn.

The documents, leaked to Platformer, say that that data includes the location of Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers, along with internal discount programs, and unreleased features. The incident was marked as “sev 2,” meaning it was severe enough to warrant paging engineers at night and making them work through the weekend.

“Some employees are sharing feedback through internal channels and ticketing systems, which is standard practice at Amazon,” a spokesperson told the publication.

“No security issue was identified as a result of that feedback. We appreciate all of the feedback we’ve already received and will continue to tune Q as it transitions from being a product in preview to being generally available.”

A spokesperson told DCD: “Amazon Q has not leaked confidential information.”

Amazon has pitched Q - which it announced Tuesday at its AWS developer conference - as a more security- and privacy-focused alternative to other generative AI chatbots.

But the internal documents claim that Q has given misleading answers on digital sovereignty and other issues. “Expect the Q team to be very, very busy for a while," one employee said in a Slack channel seen by Platformer. "I’ve also seen apparent Q hallucinations I’d expect to potentially induce cardiac incidents in Legal.”

Amazon closely guards the location of its vast data center footprint, which is a combination of its own builds and wholesale leases. In 2018, WikiLeaks published internal Amazon documents showing where the company's data centers were located as of 2015.

Since then, specific facility locations have only been revealed due to reporting on planning documents, but the exact location of all its data centers is not public.

In its latest 10-K filing, AWS revealed that it owns 15.4 million square feet of data center space around the world and leases another 18 million, as of December 2022. That includes both white and grey space.