Amazon has upgraded its Alexa voice assistant after it "asked" a 10-year-old girl to press a penny to the prongs of a half-inserted plug.
The proposal occurred when the girl asked Alexa for a "task to do".
"Plug in a phone charger roughly halfway into a wall socket, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs," the smart speaker suggested.
Amazon claimed it addressed the problem as soon as the business became aware of it.
The girl's mother, Kristin Livdahl, reported the event on Twitter.
She said: "We were performing some physical challenges, like laying down and turning over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [physical education] teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outdoors. She just wanted another one."
That's when the Echo speaker advised engaging in the challenge that it had "discovered on the web".
The deadly practise, known as "the penny challenge", began circulating on TikTok and other social media platforms around a year ago.
Metals carry electricity and placing them into live electrical outlets can cause electric shocks, fires and other harm.
"I know you might lose fingers, hands, arms," Michael Clusker, station manager at Carlisle East fire station, told The Press newspaper in Yorkshire in 2020.
"The result from this is that someone will be gravely wounded."
Fire officials in the US have also spoken out against the so-called challenge.
Ms Livdahl wrote that she interfered, yelling: "No, Alexa, no!"
However, she added her daughter was "too educated to do anything like that".
Amazon informed the BBC in a statement that it has upgraded Alexa to prevent the assistant advocating similar conduct in the future.
"Customer trust is at the core of all we do and Alexa is meant to offer accurate, relevant, and useful information to consumers," stated Amazon in a statement.
"As soon as we got aware of this problem, we took immediate steps to remedy it."
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