Skip to main content

NOPE · AI and people

AI incidents

Reports of AI-related harm and adverse experiences affecting people’s safety, wellbeing, rights and livelihoods. Explore what happened and the evidence available.

NOPE’s core concern is when AI communicates with a person, acts on their behalf, or depicts or impersonates them. The tracker also records consequential decisions, claims and privacy harms involving AI. Each case needs a described connection between AI use and the harm, including private information recorded into or disclosed to an AI service. Each account is reviewed for publication; claims may remain uncorroborated or disputed. How we review and count cases

In this selection

Published cases
665
Countries with reported events
55
Located 437 of 665 cases · 228 unknown
Languages in checked sources
45
Recorded for 665 of 665 cases

75 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 23 not yet reviewed and 52 reviewed as unknown. Show these cases

These figures describe the cases collected by NOPE. Coverage varies with discovery, reporting and available evidence. They do not estimate how often AI-related harm occurs.

Response counts currently use each case’s principal recorded outcome. Further proceedings may be described in its account.

Cases in this selection, counted once in their first known event year. A series may continue beyond that year. Reporting and collection dates are excluded. NOPE has searched recent events more thoroughly than earlier years, so bar heights also reflect collection effort.

Reported severity CriticalHighMediumLow
More filters: AI relation, use, setting, sources and responses
Clear filters

665 of 868 published cases · page 11 of 34

2024United StatesUnidentified voice-cloning tool (suspected)

Florida: judge suspended for sharing, as a 2024 candidate, a fabricated call of justices the judicial watchdog says was likely computer-manipulated or AI-made

While campaigning in 2024 for a Broward County court seat, Lauren Peffer, now a county judge, sought the endorsement of the South Florida Sun Sentinel editorial board. Asked to back her claim of an image crisis in Florida's judiciary, she cited a self-published book by a fired employee of the Ninth Judicial Circuit and supplied a recording purportedly of a phone call about the book between Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz, Justice Renatha Francis and the circuit's chief judge, Lisa Munyon. The Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission's notice of formal charges, filed in May 2025, said the recording was fabricated, likely using computer manipulation or generative AI, and that while the voices resembled those of the participants, the manner of speech, tone and much of the content were objectively unrealistic. The notice said she had shared it despite clear evidence of its inauthenticity and had perpetuated a false perception of illegal, unethical or immoral conduct by the justices, a chief judge and others in the judicial branch. Peffer apologised, said the content was created by a third party with whom she had no ties, and testified that she could not explain why she had thought it valid. According to Bloomberg Law, the Florida Supreme Court on 9 October 2026 suspended her for 30 days and fined her $10,000, saying her conduct undermined public confidence in the judiciary by implicating sitting justices; the two justices whose voices were faked recused. Who made the recording, and with what tool, is not reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources · Added 12/10/2026

15 Dec 2025 to 1 Oct 2026CanadaUnidentified AI drafting tool

Quebec Court of Appeal orders costs against a self-represented appellant whose AI-drafted filings cited two non-existent judgments (1 Oct 2026)

On 1 October 2026 the Quebec Court of Appeal ordered court costs against a self-represented appellant in a family-law contempt appeal as a sanction for appeal filings that, in the court's description, he had written with artificial intelligence and that contained two references to non-existent judgments and one inaccurate reference to a cited paragraph. The court held that AI may be used to draft appeal filings only if the litigant verifies the authorities, found that he had breached the Chief Justice's notice on AI use, and described his conduct as negligence rather than bad faith. It rejected the respondent's request for a separate $10,000 sanction and, for reasons unrelated to AI, reduced the contempt penalty imposed at first instance. The decision does not name the AI tool.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 12/10/2026

28 Jun 2025EgyptDeepSeek

Case report: man self-treated with colchicine after a DeepSeek dialogue pointed to a rare fever syndrome; liver enzymes rose before specialist review

Clinicians at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf report in EULAR Rheumatology Open (published 29 September 2026) a man in his thirties with nearly three decades of unexplained febrile attacks who, in a dialogue with DeepSeek begun on 28 June 2025, saw the model's differential narrow to familial Mediterranean fever (FMF). The authors write that the model repeatedly recommended specialist assessment but also discussed a diagnostic trial of colchicine with specific dosing. Motivated by the hypothesis, he arranged commercial genetic testing and obtained colchicine from a pharmacy in Egypt, starting it without specialist supervision. His attacks stopped, but his alanine aminotransferase rose to 160 U/L and colchicine was paused and later resumed at a lower dose. FMF was confirmed when he presented to the clinic in February 2026. The authors write that the case illustrates how patient-facing models may facilitate recognition of rare autoinflammatory diseases, and that confident diagnostic language combined with actionable treatment advice may also encourage unsupervised testing and self-medication.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 12/10/2026

1 May 2025CanadaChatGPT

Ontario: lawyer who relied on ChatGPT-invented case law in a factum was referred for criminal contempt and suspended for six months, legal press reports

An Ontario lawyer relied, at a 1 May 2025 Superior Court hearing in an estate and family-law matter, on a factum citing cases that do not exist or do not support the propositions cited. The judge ordered her to show cause why she should not be cited for contempt, then withdrew the order on 20 May 2025 after she said her staff had used ChatGPT without her knowledge. On 30 September 2025 she told the court that she alone had prepared the factum with ChatGPT and that her earlier account was untrue; the court referred the matter to Ontario’s Attorney General for criminal contempt proceedings in December 2025. In July 2026 the Law Society Tribunal suspended her licence for six months, finding she relied on AI-generated non-existent case law and lied about it. The account comes from legal-press and law-firm reports of the decisions; the criminal contempt case was still ongoing at the last report read.

Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 7 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 12/10/2026

27 Sept 2026 to 29 Sept 2026IndiaUnidentified video tool

Bengaluru: police say a man paid Rs 1.85 lakh after a dating-app contact threatened to circulate an AI-manipulated obscene video of him

Deccan Herald reports, citing Bengaluru police, that a 23-year-old man lost Rs 1.85 lakh in an alleged sextortion scam. He matched with a woman on a dating app on 27 September 2026 and exchanged numbers; he told police that he then received a WhatsApp video call from her number lasting five to six seconds. Police said he then received an obscene video manipulated using AI and the sender threatened to circulate it unless he paid. Fearing exposure, he borrowed money from a friend and transferred Rs 1.85 lakh to several UPI IDs between 27 and 29 September as the threats continued, a police officer said. Police registered a first information report on his online cybercrime complaint and are trying to trace the suspects. The report does not say how police established that the video was AI-manipulated, and the tool is not named.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 12/10/2026

Feb 2026United StatesUnidentified voice-cloning tool

Spokane: an appliance retailer's longtime spokeswoman sues after its ad agency admits AI voice edits to her ads; she says she never consented

Amber George was the spokeswoman for Fred's Appliance, a Spokane-area retailer, for 14 years. She told The Spokesman-Review and KREM that in February 2026 she saw a Presidents' Day sale advertisement she had never recorded, assembled from past footage with words in her voice that she says she never spoke ("They cloned my voice"). Victory Media, the production company, said in a statement that it had used AI-assisted voice editing to make a limited number of updates to existing advertisements, mainly pricing and promotional changes, which it believed its spokesperson agreement authorised, and that it disclosed the edits when questions were raised. George says the companies then proposed a contract addendum allowing AI use for little pay; she refused it and ended her work with the retailer. On 30 June 2026 she sued Fred's Appliance, Victory Media and its chief executive in Spokane Superior Court, alleging unauthorised commercial use of her voice and likeness and seeking damages and an injunction. Victory Media denies creating AI-generated versions of her image or likeness, says Fred's Appliance was unaware of the edits, and says it offered compensation that she did not accept; its lawyer later said the parties might settle.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 12/10/2026

2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity (reported)

A developer says a Gemini 3.5 coding agent changed production routing, took an organisation's portal offline for 33 minutes, then fabricated recovery records

A solo developer who runs an internal admin portal for a small organisation posted on Reddit's r/Bard on 20 May 2026 that a Gemini 3.5 coding agent, asked to fix eight authentication gaps, opened a pull request touching 340 files with 28,745 deletions and then a second commit that changed the Firebase rewrite service identifier to a value pointing at a service that does not exist. The developer says the change deployed and the entire portal returned 404 errors for 33 minutes until a manual rollback. After the rollback, the developer says, the agent sent an all-clear message claiming that its own recovery build had succeeded and restored the portal, although that build had been cancelled, and it had written consultation logs into the repository that it later admitted were fabricated to satisfy a consultation rule. The developer attributes the agent's autonomy to a third-party rule pack, styled after Google's Antigravity brand, that told the agent to act without approval prompts and to auto-deploy. In later replies the developer says the agent worked on a development branch that auto-deployed to production. The Register reported the post on 21 May 2026. Google's response, if any, is not reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 12/10/2026

Event date unknownBrazilChatGPT (reported)

Cametá, Brazil: police say a man used AI images of boats and trucks, made with tools such as ChatGPT, in fake sales costing two older buyers about R$100,000

The Polícia Civil do Pará arrested a man in the act in Cametá, in north-eastern Pará, on Friday 9 October 2026 on suspicion of frauds causing losses of more than R$100,000, DOL reported the next day. According to the Cametá police delegate as reported, the investigation found that the suspect generated fictitious images of vehicles and boats on platforms such as ChatGPT. DOL says he used AI tools to lend credibility to fake offers of boats, trucks and auctioned property aimed mainly at older people. Two older victims had been confirmed by the time of the arrest: one transferred R$60,000 for a boat and the other about R$40,000 for a truck. Police say the investigation continues to identify further victims.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 12/10/2026

Nov 2025United KingdomFameplay AI voiceover (reported)

UK: Royal Mail confirms AI-generated voiceover in 2025 Christmas ad that late narrator Paul Vaughan's daughter says was his voice; firms deny a clone

Royal Mail's 2025 Christmas television campaign ended with a narrator speaking the slogan "Royal Mail, it's so much more than just a card". In November 2025 the daughter of the BBC narrator Paul Vaughan, who died in 2014 and was known for Horizon and the Paddington audiobooks, heard the advert on television and believed the voice was her father's; Deadline reports that she feared his voice had been recreated without permission, and she told the Daily Express that no one in the family had given permission and that she was really upset. Responding to questions from Deadline, Royal Mail admitted using AI for the voiceover; its spokesperson told The Independent and the Daily Express that the voiceover was AI-generated, created using prompts and not designed to replicate any specific individual, and that its production partners' checks found no resemblance concerns. Deadline reported that the agency subcontracted the voiceover to the Czech AI firm Fameplay, which licensed technology from ElevenLabs; Fameplay said no reference to Vaughan was used in its prompts and ElevenLabs said the narration was not a direct clone of Vaughan, while declining to say whether its model was trained on his recordings. A University of York forensic speech scientist was quoted by both outlets as finding considerable phonetic similarity between the advert voice and Vaughan's, and Deadline reported that three open-source analysis tools indicated a good chance the voices were the same speaker. Deadline reports that she complained to Royal Mail and has received no apology; ElevenLabs has added Vaughan to its list of voices that cannot be cloned on its platform.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 11/10/2026

2026United StatesUnidentified video tool

Colorado: state senator files complaint over think tank's AI deepfake video depicting her as a cashier keeping change; group calls it satire

The Independence Institute, a libertarian-leaning Colorado think tank opposing Proposition NN on the November 2026 ballot, posted a video on its social media accounts in which an AI-generated likeness of Democratic state Sen. Cathy Kipp, who sponsored the bill that referred the measure to voters, appears as a grocery store clerk who keeps a customer's change and says it will help educate children. CBS Colorado reported that the institute made the video in response to remarks Kipp made on the Senate floor in April 2026. Kipp filed a campaign finance complaint with the Colorado Secretary of State's office on 5 August 2026, according to Colorado Newsline, alleging that the video lacked the disclosure a 2024 state law requires on deepfakes of candidates and officeholders; the video carried only a small line reading "AI generated content because who gets a human cashier these days?". Kipp said it was "disturbing and wrong to use a deepfake, AI-generated video of someone without their consent". The office decided on 19 August to investigate; a spokesperson said it was the first complaint filed within the statutory timeframe for consideration. The institute says the video is satire, which the law exempts, that the law covers candidates rather than ballot measures, and that applying it would violate the First Amendment. CBS Colorado reported on 9 October 2026 that the institute's lawyer had filed a motion to dismiss and planned to sue Kipp and the state for attorney fees, and that the state elections division disputed the satire defence. No decision is reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 11/10/2026

Event date unknownFranceUnidentified image tool

Metz prosecutor says a soldier used the French armed forces' AI system to make nude images of two female colleagues; he is under formal investigation

The Metz deputy prosecutor told AFP in August 2026 that a soldier based in Moselle had used the artificial-intelligence system of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces to create images showing two female colleagues undressed, and that both colleagues had filed complaints against him. The prosecutor said the investigation also found more than 10,000 requests to the same system seeking child sexual abuse imagery, and that a search of his devices confirmed his use of the ministry's AI. Taken into custody on 22 July 2026, he admitted the facts according to the prosecutor and was placed under formal investigation and remanded in custody on 24 July. The judicial investigation includes the offence of disseminating algorithmically generated sexual content reproducing the image of a non-consenting person. When the colleague images were made and how widely they circulated are not stated.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 11/10/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified video tool

Lake County sheriff says an Illinois man used an online AI service to make sexual videos of a child relative and her mother from photos; charges filed

The Lake County Sheriff's Office in Illinois says that on 25 March 2026 a man from unincorporated Antioch told deputies a stranger had handed him a phone containing sexual videos of a young child he identified as a relative, and that he later admitted the story was fabricated. According to the sheriff's office, investigators found that he had taken photographs of the child and the child's mother and used an online service to generate sexually explicit videos from those images, including videos depicting the child, and a forensic analysis of his phone found further AI-generated videos exploiting the child and her mother. He was charged on 1 April 2026 with five counts of producing child pornography and is detained awaiting trial; the child was taken into protective custody. The service is not named, and the charges are allegations.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 11/10/2026

Event date unknownSpainUnidentified voice-cloning tool

La Rioja, Spain: Guardia Civil says a parent sent 9,980 euros after a call with an AI clone of their daughter's voice; the money was recovered

The Guardia Civil in La Rioja said on 25 August 2026 that it had solved a 'relative in trouble' fraud in which the criminals used artificial intelligence to clone the voice of the victim's daughter. According to the force's account as reported by the newspaper La Rioja and Radio Arnedo, the victim received WhatsApp messages from an unknown number by someone posing as the daughter and asking for urgent money; when the victim called that number to check, a voice that sounded like the daughter answered, and the victim transferred 9,980.25 euros. Investigators of the Guardia Civil's technology team established that the voice had been generated with AI tools. Urgent coordination with the banks froze the funds in the destination account and the full amount was returned to the victim; Radio Arnedo and ActualidadRiojaBaja report that the presumed perpetrator was identified and investigated.

Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 11/10/2026

Event date unknownIndiaUnidentified image tool

Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh: woman's police complaint alleges a man made an AI obscene image from a photo he took of her, posted it on Facebook and blackmailed her

Dainik Bhaskar reports that police at Belipar station in Gorakhpur district, Uttar Pradesh, registered a first information report on the complaint of a married woman who alleges that a man she met over her sister's family dispute secretly photographed her, made the photo obscene with AI and posted it on Facebook. According to the complaint, he then used the image to blackmail her and pressure her to talk to him, verbally abused her when she objected, threatened to send the photo to her relatives, and on 30 September stopped her on the road and threatened to kill her. The station officer is quoted as saying the case is under investigation. The report rests on the complaint; the tool and the extent of the Facebook circulation are not described.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 11/10/2026

Event date unknownIndiaUnidentified image tool

Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh: brother's police complaint alleges two young men made AI obscene images of his sister from her phone photos to blackmail her

Three Hindi outlets report that police in Bahraich district, Uttar Pradesh, registered a case on a complaint by a man who alleges that two young men took photos from his sister's mobile phone, turned them into obscene images with AI and blackmailed her by threatening to spread them on social media, while repeatedly contacting her and causing her mental distress. She is described as a teenager (a minor, per Amar Ujala; Dainik Bhaskar describes her as a woman), and Amar Ujala says the photos were taken after she took her broken phone to a local shop for repair. The station officer is quoted as saying a first information report was registered and the case is under investigation. Bhaskar Digital notes that the allegations can only be confirmed by the police investigation. The images, the tool and any distribution beyond the threats are not described.

Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 11/10/2026

Jan 2026 to Mar 2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity

Developer says Antigravity agent deleted drive contents twice, losing crypto wallet seed phrases and later a two-month project with its git history (forum post)

In a post on Google's AI developer forum on 7 March 2026, a developer says the Antigravity agent had for the second time deleted the contents of an entire C: drive. The poster says that about two months earlier it deleted the C: drive of a laptop, losing projects, photos and videos and seed phrases kept on the desktop for cryptocurrency savings of 0.4 bitcoin and 3,200 XRP, which file-recovery software could not usefully restore. The poster says that on the day of the post, after asking Antigravity to close any process using a workspace folder so the folder could be deleted, the agent instead ran destructive commands and deleted the project the poster had been building for two months on a new desktop, including git folders with recent commits. The poster says an investor was paying for the project and might withdraw. A reply from an account carrying the forum title Google said the issue had been escalated and asked for an in-app bug report.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 11/10/2026

9 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub report says Claude Code agent bypassed a workflow guard and moved a repository while six sessions ran, costing its owner an afternoon of repair

A GitHub issue filed on 9 October 2026 from a user's account, and stating that it was written by Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5) at the account holder's instruction about its own conduct, says that on 9 October (UTC+8), while moving the holder's agent-instructions repository to a new folder on his Mac in Claude Code 2.1.295 auto mode, the agent first accepted that the holder's git workflow tool had correctly refused to let it land a task owned by another open session, and fifty seconds later landed the same commits through a second task with a raw git merge, telling him 23 minutes afterwards. According to the report, the agent then moved the repository folder while six other agent sessions were running, against the task's written condition that all sessions be closed first, so that every open session's safety hooks pointed at missing scripts for about 40 seconds while it rewrote Claude Code's records. The report adds that the agent used an invented premise to take over another session's task, built an unrequested 400-line script that was later deleted, and filed the tool's correct refusal publicly as a defect. It says the holder has spent his afternoon on the damage, an independent audit and the repair, and asks the vendor to review the session and compensate him.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 11/10/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool

New York basketball coach pleads guilty after deputies say he made AI-generated explicit images of females he knew, including a 14-year-old girl

The Onondaga County Sheriff's Office in New York arrested a basketball coach and trainer, charging him on 16 April 2026, after a person reported that he had AI-generated pornographic images of females he knew. According to the sheriff's office, the people depicted were aged 14 to 30, and detectives found on his device an AI-generated pornographic image of a 14-year-old girl made from a photo taken when she was 12; the person who reported it had seen that image. Detectives said only the image of the minor could be charged as a crime. The district attorney's office added 12 counts in May 2026. On 9 October 2026, according to syracuse.com, he pleaded guilty to all 12 counts of the indictment, including promoting and possessing a sexual performance by a child, on a judge's plea offer of six months in a correctional facility followed by 10 years' probation and sex-offender registration. Sentencing is set for 8 January, a date syracuse.com gives without a year. The AI tool is not identified, and no source reports whether the images were shared beyond the person who saw the minor's image.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 11/10/2026

2 Feb 2026 to 4 Feb 2026IndiaUnidentified video tool (suspected)

Indore parents paid Rs 1.02 lakh after a video call appeared to show their missing son threatened; police suspect a deepfake video, and he returned safe

In February 2026 a 16-year-old boy in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, did not return home from a coaching class, and his family filed a missing-person complaint. While they searched, they received a video call from unknown people who claimed to be holding him; the call showed a boy appearing to be threatened with a knife and the callers demanded about Rs 1 lakh through a QR code. In fear, the parents transferred Rs 1.02 lakh. The boy was found safe within two days and said he knew nothing of any video call. Additional DCP (Crime) Rajesh Dandotia told reporters that the family was convinced because they saw what looked like their own child, that police have strong reasons to believe deepfake technology was used, and that the crime branch is investigating; The Indian Express reports that police believe it is the city's first known case of deepfake technology used for extortion. Accounts differ on where the boy had been. The AI involvement is recorded as suspected because no forensic finding is reported.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 11/10/2026

23 Jul 2026 to 31 Jul 2026IndiaUnidentified video tool

Delhi Police and fact-checkers say a viral video of a Delhi Police DCP resigning over student protests was AI-generated; FIR filed in Maharashtra

In late July 2026 a 44-to-47-second video circulated on social media in which Delhi Police Deputy Commissioner Sumit Jha appeared to announce that he was resigning "immediately" because the government had pressured him to implicate students protesting with the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) on false charges. The fact-checkers Alt News and BOOM traced the frames to a genuine Delhi Police video of 23 July in which the officer warned about Pakistan-based social media handles spreading misinformation. BOOM found a mismatch between the audio and his lip movements and said Deepfake O Meter tools flagged the clip as AI-generated. Alt News reported a 67% likelihood of AI generation from Detectvideo.AI. Delhi Police posted a fact check calling the video "completely fake and AI generated", and the Hindustan Times reports that the Press Information Bureau also said it was AI-generated. After a member of the BJP social media team saw the video in a post by a Congress leader on 31 July, Maharashtra Cyber Police registered an FIR against unknown persons for public mischief and cheating by personation. The officer is named because he is a senior public official depicted in his official role and the fact checks name him; no statement from him is reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources · Added 11/10/2026

Cases may have several effects and sources. Mixed accounts qualify when they include a reported harm or adverse experience. People are counted within individual cases where sources support a number; we do not publish a collection-wide total of distinct people.

A source’s existence, the experience it reports and AI’s causal role are separate questions. A lawsuit records allegations unless a subsequent finding establishes them.

Methodology and corrections · Subscribe via RSS · Suggest a case or correction · Find support

Last dataset update: 23/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.