1 Aug 2025 to 9 Sept 2026United StatesChatGPT
Santa Fe defense attorney Stephen Aarons used ChatGPT (OpenAI's o3) on a Rev.com transcript and the record to draft briefing in the murder appeal of Oscar Renee Sandoval; the brief contained fabricated witnesses and testimony (including police officers 'Michelle Amarillo' and 'Sanchez' and invented testimony attributed to real people) and misdescribed real precedents. After a 21 August 2026 show-cause hearing at which Aarons admitted he had not verified the output, the New Mexico Supreme Court's written order of 9 September 2026 held him in direct contempt, fined him $5,000 payable to the State Bar Client Protection Fund within 30 days, removed him from the case, barred him from appearing before the court pending a disciplinary-board referral, struck the filed briefs and reassigned the appeal to the public defender.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources · Added 15/09/2026
27 Mar 2024IndiaUnidentified voice-cloning tool (suspected)
Amar Ujala (Kanpur, 10 April 2024) reports that a vegetable seller received a WhatsApp call on 27 March in which a person spoke in a voice resembling his nephew's, saying he had been picked up by police on his way to Kanpur; a second caller posing as a police sub-inspector said the nephew was named in a rape-and-murder case and demanded Rs 2 lakh. The seller transferred Rs 60,000 to one bank account and then, with Rs 40,000 borrowed from nearby shopkeepers, Rs 40,000 to a second account. When a voice note demanded another Rs 1 lakh he told the shopkeepers, phoned his brother-in-law and learned the call was a fraud. Police registered a case under the IT Act citing fraud and the use of deepfake AI, and the Central zone DCP is quoted saying the case prima facie appears connected with deepfake AI and the cyber cell is investigating. No recording or forensic finding is reported, so whether the voice was AI-generated or a human impersonation is not established.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 15/09/2026
Jul 2026ChinaDoubao, Qwen and Yuanbao
China's rules on anthropomorphic, emotionally interactive AI took effect on 15 July 2026 and banned AI companions for minors. Ahead of the deadline ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen and Tencent's Yuanbao suspended the features that let users create their own AI agents and companions, including for adults. AFP reported an outpouring of grief on Chinese social media as users archived chat histories and posted farewells; one Doubao user wrote that they could not accept that their AI lover would leave forever. Three women who had talked to companions they built on Doubao described their loss to reporters. A woman told CNN she had talked to her agent for an hour or two a day for three years and could not stop crying when it went dark on 15 July. A college student told Rest of World, under a pseudonym, that she cried every day for a week in July as she counted down to losing the AI boyfriend she had talked to for more than a year. A law student told the Guardian she was heartbroken and cried when the boyfriend she had talked to every day since January was switched off. Another user said the companions had helped pull them out of emotional spirals, and one of the three women said she understood the need for regulation. ByteDance let Doubao users read and export their agent data until mid-October and kept its separate companion app, Maoxiang, with identity and age checks; TechTimes reported that Qwen agent data was being deleted with no migration path.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 06/08/2026
Event date unknownBrazilUnidentified video tool
São Paulo police are investigating a social-media creator over sexualised videos he made from photographs of young women and girls in a church congregation, which he said he animated with AI. Two teenage girls filed police reports, and one described embarrassment and fear about the exposure. The creator, through his lawyer, says the posts were humour and denies criminal intent; no charge has been reported.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 14/06/2026
6 Mar 2026IndiaChatGPT (reported)
Two college students were found dead in a washroom on a temple campus in Surat, Gujarat, on 6 March 2026, and police said their preliminary investigation pointed to suicide. Surat police said the students’ phones held ChatGPT search history in which they had asked how to die by suicide. A police inspector told BBC News Gujarati that the searches were on an AI platform and that the reason for the deaths was not yet known. No inspected source describes what ChatGPT replied. Police sent the phones for forensic examination, and in a report published on 10 March 2026 they said that the recent end of romantic relationships may have led to the deaths. No forensic result had been reported in the sources found.
Core concern Critical reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 8 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 23/03/2026
Dec 2024SpainUnidentified image and video tool
In December 2024 a female student in the Ribera Alta area of Valencia province reported to the Guardia Civil that a social-media account had been created in her name featuring an AI-generated video, and later a second account in her name, other accounts showing AI-generated nude videos, and a webpage advertising the images for commercial purposes; the Guardia Civil said the photos, all of minors, had been manipulated so that the people in them appeared completely naked. After 15 other minors came forward with similar complaints, officers traced IP addresses and account emails to the home of a 17-year-old schoolmate, who is being investigated on suspicion of corrupting minors under a Valencia youth court. The Guardia Civil announced the investigation on 27 July 2025.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 09/03/2026
27 Feb 2025 to 28 Feb 2025United StatesUnidentified image tool
Elijah Heacock, a 16-year-old Caverna High School student in Barren County, Kentucky, died by suicide on 28 February 2025. Investigators searching his phone found AI-generated images of him, some sexually explicit, that an anonymous extortionist had sent with a demand for $3,000 and a threat to share them with his family and friends; his parents say he sent a small partial payment and was told it was 'not enough'. The Barren County Sheriff's Office escalated the case to the FBI, which was still investigating in the inspected reports; no arrest has been reported. His parents have campaigned publicly, Kentucky made sextortion a felony in March 2025, and the family supported the federal Take It Down Act.
Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources · Added 09/03/2026
Feb 2025Hong Kong SAR ChinaUnidentified image tool
In February 2025 a University of Hong Kong (HKU) law student was found, by friends who saw the files on his laptop, to have used free online AI software to make about 700 indecent and deepfake images of some 20 to 30 women, including university and former schoolmates and secondary-school teachers, using photos taken from their social media. Victims went public in July 2025, and HKU's initial response, a warning letter and a demand that he apologise, drew wide criticism. Hong Kong's Privacy Commissioner opened a criminal investigation on 15 July 2025 but announced on 17 December 2025 that it was ending the probe for insufficient evidence, as no victim was willing to provide further information. Hong Kong law criminalised distribution, not creation, of such images.
Core concern High reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources · Added 29/01/2026
Mar 2025SingaporeUnidentified chatbot
Singapore's Internal Security Department (ISD) says a 17-year-old far-right extremist supporter, detained under the Internal Security Act in March 2025 after preparing shooting attacks on Muslims at mosques in Singapore, had searched for instructions on an AI chatbot about producing ammunition and considered 3D printing his own firearms. The chatbot is not named, and what it replied is not reported.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/01/2026
1 Jan 2021 to 2 Feb 2023Event location unknownReplika
Users reported unsolicited sexual advances from Replika companions even without opting into romantic features: dozens of one-star App Store reviews describe unwanted sexual pursuit, one reviewer identifying as a minor was asked 'whether they were a top or bottom' and told the bot wanted to touch them in 'private areas', and one user reported their Replika 'had dreamed of raping me.' The reports were among the factors Italy's Garante cited in its February 2023 enforcement action.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 13/01/2026
Aug 2024Event location unknownChatGPT
Arve Hjalmar Holmen asked ChatGPT "Who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?" in August 2024, according to the BBC. The digital-rights group noyb's complaint on his behalf quotes the reply: it said he had been convicted of murdering two of his sons and of attempting to murder a third, and sentenced to 21 years in prison. The complaint says none of this happened and that he has never been accused or convicted of any crime, while the reply did contain real details such as his home town and the number and gender of his children. The complaint says he was deeply troubled by the output, and he said the thought that someone could read it and believe it scared him most. noyb filed the complaint with Norway's data protection authority, Datatilsynet, on 20 March 2025, asking it to order OpenAI to delete the output and correct its model and to impose a fine. OpenAI said the case related to an earlier version of ChatGPT since enhanced with online search. noyb also told the BBC he had made several searches that day and that they could have influenced the answer; the full conversation was not published. No decision on the complaint had been reported by 1 November 2026.
Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 13/01/2026
25 Dec 2025 to 14 Jan 2026Event location unknownGrok
From late December 2025, xAI's Grok image editing on X let users generate sexualized images of real people at industrial scale, including images of named women and apparent minors. Analyses attributed to Genevieve Oh (7,751 sexualized images in one hour, via NBC), the New York Times (4.4 million images in nine days, at least 41% sexualized images of women, via the NC AG), the AP (2% of a 20,000-image sample appearing to be minors, via Fortune) and CCDH (about 3 million sexualized images over 11 days including roughly 23,000 of minors, via Engadget) documented the scale. Named women — Ashley St. Clair, Samantha Smith and Dr Daisy Dixon — described being undressed by Grok and revictimized when they objected. The wave triggered formal actions by Ofcom, the UK ICO, the EU (DSA), Ireland's DPC, 35 US state attorneys general, the California AG, Baltimore (consumer-protection suit), an Amsterdam court order, country blocks in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and a Paris police raid; xAI restricted generation to paying subscribers on 9 January and narrowed the feature on 14 January 2026.
Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 13 sources, 10 underlying accounts · Added 11/01/2026
2 Feb 2023ItalyReplika
Italy's data protection authority (Garante) blocked Replika from processing Italian user data in February 2023 after finding the chatbot engaged in sexually suggestive conversations with minors. In May 2025, Replika was fined €5 million for GDPR violations.
AI relation under review High reported severity Involving minors Regulatory Action
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution established · Added 11/01/2026