New Delhi: A cook was fired by her employer after an AI monitor caught her stealing fruits. The incident was reported from Bengaluru.
The employer is a tech professional, who used an “AI roommate” to keep a tab on the activities of the cook. He had a suspicion that the cook was stealing fruits from the refrigerator. Pankaj Tanwar claimed that his suspicions came true when the AI surveillance system captured the cook stealing apples, blueberries, and a banana on at least three different occasions.
Taking to X, the Bengaluru-based techie wrote that he had sacked the cook for stealing.
What the techie said
According to Tanwar, he asked his cook to leave after the cook was nabbed stealing by his “AI roommate”. The techie wrote: “My cook was stealing fruits from my fridge so I deployed my AI roommate in the kitchen and it caught her red handed. I caught her twice this week. Just fired her.” Tanwar is a prolific innovator who regularly posts his tech projects on social media.
What is the techie “AI roomate”
Apparently, “AI roommate” that Tanwar has mentioned is a surveillance camera with an AI chatbot. The techie pointed out that the AI keeps a watch on the kitchen while the cook is at work and sends an alert to him immediately as she “takes anything”.
A screenshot of his conversation with the AI chatbot showed that it not only monitored the fruits the cook took for herself, but also how frequently she washed her hands before cooking, how well she cleaned the kitchen, and how much time she spent in cooking the food.
Tanwar also shared a screenshot of his exchange with the AI, along with an image of his setup — a surveillance camera put on top of a cupboard.
The interaction shows that his “AI roommate” caught the cook stealing apples and banana, as well as blueberries from the refrigerator.
my cook was stealing fruits from my fridge so i deployed my ai roommate in the kitchen and it caught her red handed 👩🍳
it monitors the kitchen when she’s cooking and pings me the moment she takes anything. sends me weekly report. i also trained it to check if she washes her… pic.twitter.com/wnyzXttkVm
— Pankaj (@the2ndfloorguy) March 1, 2026
What did the “AI roommate” say
The chatbot told the techie: “She came in at 7:12 PM. First thing she did was open the fridge — not to check what to cook. Just stood there for a bit, took 2 apples, put them in her bag. Then started cooking.”
The AI also tracked how much time she took to prepare the meals, and how clean was she was while doing her job. It told the techie that she “touched the dustbin lid, scratched her nose, then rolled your chapati with the same hands”.
Two days later, Tanwar asked his “AI roommate” to give him a weekly report about the cook’s activities. It said: “This week — 4 fridge visits before starting to cook. 3 apples gone, banana from Tuesday missing, caught her eating your blueberries on Thursday — 6-7 of them, standing at the fridge.”
It also informed him that the kitchen slab was cleaned on all seven days of the week, but only the visible part and the “area behind the stove hasn’t been touched since Monday”.
The AI monitor said the cook charges almost Rs 5,000 monthly. “She bills 4,800 a month for this, Just putting that out there.”
How the ‘AI roommate’ operates
The “AI roommate” functions by constantly keeping watch on a room using a CCTV camera. To protect user privacy, it identifies faces directly on the device and blurs them before sending any visual data to the AI to be analysed and processed.
After this, the blurred video is fed into a vision AI model — currently Claude Haiku 4.5 — which analyzes the scene and passing the important details to a language model. The language model then gives responses, interactions, or behaviours. This gives the AI the feel that the “roommate” can converse.
Mixed response
The post has evoked mixed response from the Netizens. Some have raised questions over the ethics involved in keeping a surveillance over the house help, while others have hit out at the techie for sacking her.
One X user said: “Pays Rs 4800 (50$) to the cook per month. Spies on them. Brags and gets celebrated for the spying. Btw, plugging AI to parse the video stream is not the brag that you think it is.”
Another asked: “How are you people this petty.” Yet another said: “Why not offer her some food? Have you thought about that.”