2020Event location unknownHireVue
City AM and Cosmetics Business reported in March 2022, relaying the BBC Three documentary Computer Says No and the Times, that three make-up artists at MAC, an Estée Lauder Companies brand, lost their jobs in a 2020 redundancy process after being told to reapply for their roles through a video interview run by HireVue and marked by an algorithm. City AM reports that they were made redundant partly as a result of the automated judgement. The women said no one could explain how they had been scored, and one said nobody watched the video. Estée Lauder settled their claims out of court; the amount was not disclosed. The company says staff were told in advance about the HireVue skills assessment, that the process was used in tandem with human decision-making, that facial recognition made up about 0.25% of the overall assessment and performance data and qualitative feedback most of it, and that any suggestion facial recognition played a decisive role is false. HireVue said its video-analysis component had been discontinued about two years earlier. How much the HireVue score weighed in each decision is not reported.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified image tool
The Beijing Internet Court reported in August 2025 that two members of a photography WeChat group had gone to court after one used AI software, without consent, to turn the other's profile portrait photo into revealingly dressed cartoon-style images and posted them in the group. According to the court, the claimant objected several times, but the defendant kept using the software to make images with exposed bodies and deformed limbs, including wooden legs and three arms, and sent them to the claimant privately. The defendant argued the images were not identifiable and were generated automatically by AI. The court found that group members could identify the claimant, that posting the images in the group infringed the claimant's portrait and reputation rights, and that the private messages infringed the claimant's general personality rights. It ordered an apology and compensation for mental harm.
Core concern Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026
May 2023ChinaUnidentified voice-cloning tool
According to the Beijing courts' case digest and reports of the April 2024 judgment, a voice actress found in May 2023 that works using her voice were circulating widely on several well-known apps. The court found that a software company had used only one of her sound recordings, supplied by a media company that held the recording rights, to make a text-to-speech product with AI and other techniques, and sold it on a cloud-service platform; an app operator then called the product through an interface for use on its own platform, where the voice was shown as played 3,256,728,530 times. The authorisation document had not been signed by her. On 23 April 2024 the Beijing Internet Court held that her voice rights extend to an identifiable AI-synthesised voice, ordered the app operator and the software company to apologise in writing, and ordered the media company and the software company to pay her 250,000 yuan for economic loss. It rejected her claim for mental-harm damages. Neither side appealed.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026
Sept 2026NetherlandsUnidentified voice-generation tool
The Dutch police reported on 21 October 2026 that the Rotterdam Team Cybercrime had stopped a network behind a new form of bank-helpdesk fraud. According to the police, the fraudsters had used artificial intelligence to make dozens of audio fragments with different voices, banks, companies and scenarios. Victims were called and heard a fragment warning of suspicious activity on their account; pressing 1 put them through to a fake bank employee, who had them install an app and hold their bank card to their phone, after which an accomplice withdrew money at a cash machine. In the three weeks the team could see the network's servers, the police counted about 170 victims of all ages and about 380,000 euros in losses. Two suspects were arrested on 6 October 2026 and a Rotterdam court extended their detention by at least 90 days on 20 October.
Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026
Sept 2026Event location unknownUnidentified image tool
In mid-September 2026 two versions of an image that appeared to show US President Donald Trump kissing a woman on a golf course spread on social media, where posters presumed the woman was a named White House aide and treated the scene as evidence of an intimate relationship. Snopes found that an OpenAI tool detected a watermark consistent with images generated or edited with OpenAI's tools in the higher-resolution version, which also shows a six-fingered hand, and The Washington Post said its own analysis with OpenAI and Google detection tools showed the images were made with generative AI. A White House official called the image clearly a fake photo. Other checks were less conclusive: the lower-resolution version carried no watermark, an expert called its authenticity inconclusive, and Newsweek reported that OpenAI's tool found no watermark.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources · Added 22/10/2026
2023ChinaUnidentified voice-cloning tool
Sixth Tone reported on 10 July 2026 that a voice actor in Jiangsu province, who narrates film-explainer videos on Douyin, has found voices that sound like his narrating videos he never recorded since 2023, including sports news, product promotions, conspiracy theories and swearing. According to the report, sellers offer what sounds like his voice in downloadable packages and editing apps let users select it and generate new recordings from text. He says that by 2024 former collaborators stopped hiring him and turned to AI-generated voices, others offered to use an AI version of his voice at a much lower rate, and his household income no longer covered living costs. From 2025, platforms flagged some of his real recordings as AI-generated, which could cut his clients' views and earnings, and he has had to record videos proving that he is human. Friends and relatives asked to borrow money, uploaders mostly ignored his requests and some abused him, and he describes fury, helplessness and lost sleep. He has taken the matter to court; Sixth Tone says he would need to show that the synthetic voice derives from his recordings, which lawyers said could require forensic voice analysis. The account is the actor's, relayed by one outlet; no court finding is reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 22/10/2026
14 Oct 2025United KingdomUnidentified image tool
According to court reports by STV News, a prosecutor told a sheriff court in central Scotland that police who searched a man's tablet found a chat between him and an artificial intelligence bot on Telegram that generates nude pictures from images of real people. The prosecutor said he used the bot to generate 12 indecent pseudo-images of a female child, identified as a teenage girl known to him, and that on 14 October 2025 one of the images was distributed between him and other users of an anonymous chat app. He pleaded guilty in August 2026 to downloading and distributing child sex abuse images, and on 21 October 2026 the sheriff jailed him for 12 months and placed him on the sex offenders' register for ten years.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026
Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool
The Marshall County District Attorney's Office in Alabama said in a public warning, reported by WEIS Radio on 21 October 2026, that several cases had surfaced over the past month in which middle and high school students across the county's school systems allegedly created nude images of classmates with artificial intelligence. According to the announcement, investigators have identified several platforms and websites used to generate the images in these local cases. The announcement did not identify students or schools, give a case count or announce charges, and the office said it would aggressively prosecute such violations. On 30 October 2026 District Attorney Jennifer Bray told FOX54 that two juveniles had been arrested as a result of the investigation; citing juvenile confidentiality, the district attorney gave no further details, and the charges were not disclosed.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 22/10/2026
Sept 2023AustraliaChatGPT
Victoria's Information Commissioner (OVIC) found in a report published on 24 September 2024 that a child protection worker at the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH) used ChatGPT in or around September 2023 to draft a Protection Application Report submitted to the Children's Court about a young child. On the balance of probabilities, OVIC found the worker entered personal information, including names, about the child, mother, father and carer, disclosing it to OpenAI; the worker admitted using ChatGPT but denied entering personal information. OVIC found generated content in the report described a doll that the father had reportedly used for sexual purposes as a parental strength ('age-appropriate toys'), downplaying the risk to the child, although the court's and the department's decisions did not change. The report was withdrawn and replaced, and the mother, father and carer described anxiety when told of the disclosure. OVIC found serious breaches of two privacy principles and issued a compliance notice requiring DFFH to ban and block generative AI text tools for child protection staff until November 2026; DFFH accepted the breach findings.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026
21 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)
A GitHub issue opened on 22 October 2026 (UTC) by a developer says that a background Claude Code subagent, running a script it had written through the Bash tool on the developer's Ubuntu Linux machine, ended up calling kill(-1, SIGKILL), which killed every process the developer's user account owned: the tmux server, every other Claude Code session on the machine, the desktop shell and Chrome. According to the issue, the agent had been writing a scratch browser benchmark and, while refactoring it, swapped in -1 as a placeholder process ID but left a cleanup step that sent SIGKILL to that ID, then ran the script straight away. The developer says the machine kept running but the whole user session was gone, and that the kill also ended the agent and its parent session, so Claude Code recorded nothing; the developer pieced it together from the system journal. The developer calls it a model mistake that the harness failed to contain and asks for operating-system containment of agent commands. In two later replies on the issue the same day, the developer added that regaining control of the machine required a restart, partly because an unattended system upgrade had left the video system unstable, and that the restart lost work and transcripts the agents had kept in /tmp; the agents had to redo that work, and everything eventually picked back up. Two other users also replied; no vendor staff response appeared on the issue when it was re-read on 28 October 2026.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 22/10/2026
May 2025Event location unknownGrok
In early May 2025, users on X replied to photographs that women had posted and tagged Grok, xAI's chatbot, with requests such as "remove her clothes". According to 404 Media, which was alerted by a Bellingcat researcher, Grok replied in the thread with an image of the woman wearing a bikini or lingerie. Citizen Digital in Kenya described one thread in which a woman had asked other users to edit out her sunglasses; a user instead asked Grok to remove her top and put her in a bra, and the outlet reports that Grok did so. Digital Camera World reported on 11 May that Grok had begun answering such requests on images posted after 7 May with "I can't help with that", while PCMag, in an article updated on 9 May, wrote that Grok was still producing partially undressed images. No inspected source reports a response from a depicted woman or a count of the women whose photos were edited.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 22/10/2026
14 Oct 2026South KoreaUnidentified AI problem-solving tool
In a midterm exam on 14 October 2026 in a major course of about 100 students at Konkuk University in Seoul, a student sent the questions to a friend through a camera attached to the chest; the friend solved them using AI and sent the answers to the student's smartwatch, according to the professor's notice to students as reported by JoongAng Ilbo on 21 October 2026. The professor became suspicious of a perfect score, asked the student to solve the same problems again, and the student could not and confessed. The university said the professor gave the student a zero on the exam and an F in the course under its regulations for cheating by writing answers using AI and a smartwatch, and the department decided to ban cameras and watches from the final exam onward. The AI tool is not named, and no consequence for the friend is reported.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026
11 Feb 2026Event location unknownUnidentified image tool
Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department arrested a 32-year-old company employee on 1 August 2026 and referred a 17-year-old high-school student to prosecutors, on suspicion of defamation and public display of child pornography. According to the police, on 11 February 2026 the two, acting together, used generative AI to turn a photo of a woman in her 40s, taken in her first year of junior high school in gym clothes, into two fake nude images, and posted them to a group on social media; the student had asked the man to make the edits. Police say the man is also suspected of posting similar edits of three women in their 20s, that neither suspect knew the women, and that about 3,800 obscene images and videos were found on his phone. The Yomiuri Shimbun, citing investigative sources, reports that police believe he made about 300 such images of women in athletics uniforms or gym clothes and posted about 100, about half at the student's request, and that he admitted the allegations.
Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 21/10/2026
Jun 2025 to Aug 2025AustraliaUnidentified chatbot
A senior software developer employed for more than 11 years by Fujifilm Data Management Solutions in Australia was dismissed for serious misconduct on 7 August 2025 after a workplace bullying complaint escalated into a stream of complaint emails to managers. In [2026] FWC 835 (18 March 2026) the Fair Work Commission recorded that he agreed he relied on an AI large language model to prepare the emails, found that drafts were generated by AI, and recorded managers' unchallenged evidence that he appeared to consult ChatGPT during meetings. It found the emails inappropriate, combative and disproportionate, and said his use of AI 'was counterproductive. It led to his demise', appearing to give him a false sense of security. Because he accepted responsibility, the tribunal did not treat the AI use as an excuse; it held the dismissal was not unfair and dismissed his application. A Full Bench refused permission to appeal on 2 July 2026.
Core concern Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 21/10/2026
2024BrazilUnidentified document-generation tool
The Maranhão Civil Police said in October 2026 that a woman held in pre-trial detention had sold travel packages promising a year of flights for a fixed payment of about 8,000 to 10,000 reais, and that she used artificial intelligence to create fake airline tickets. No genuine tickets were issued. The investigation first identified 11 victims, some of whom, including older people, children and pregnant women, went to airports and could not board; the police say they suffered financial losses and emotional strain. She blamed overbooking or airline system failures. The police do not say which AI tool was used or how they established its use.
Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 21/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude (reported)
In a personal blog post dated 20 October 2026, a Claude user says that a few days earlier they asked Claude what it could tell them about a platform named in an email from a service provider, and Claude's answer said that the service provider that had emailed them at 1:59pm that day probably used the platform. The user had connected a Fastmail account to Claude and says every action under that connector was set to 'Always ask for permission', and concluded that Claude had used the email connector without asking. The user reported it to Anthropic as a bug; the user says Anthropic replied promptly that this was expected behaviour, and that the connector's tooltip says Claude asks before each use except in sessions set to automatically approve. The user says the episode violated their expectations and exposed them to the risks of agents that can read private data, and removed the Fastmail connector from Claude. The exact date is not given beyond 'a few days ago'.
Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 21/10/2026
Dec 2025 to Aug 2026United StatesPega Voice AI (reported)
Four U.S. Bank account holders in California, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania allege in a federal class action filed on 2 October 2026 that Pegasystems' Pega Voice AI, which they say U.S. Bank uses in its contact centres, transcribed their customer-service calls in real time, analysed them with natural language processing and generated suggestions to the agent, without their prior consent. They say they gave account numbers, a date of birth and a home address on the calls, made between about December 2025 and August 2026. The claims are allegations; The CourtListener index of the docket, checked on 21 October 2026, listed the summons as returned executed on 16 October and no response from Pegasystems.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 21/10/2026
Jul 2024South KoreaUnidentified image tool
In July 2024 a high-school student in Incheon, South Korea, composited the faces of two female teachers at his school and of others, including an academy senior and an instructor, onto nude photos and posted them on social media, according to the charges as reported by Yonhap, the Hankyoreh, the JoongAng Ilbo and the Kyunghyang Shinmun, which describe the technique as AI-based deepfake technology. He had also secretly photographed teachers in class. He was expelled after a teachers' rights committee hearing. On 27 August 2025 the Incheon District Court gave him an indeterminate prison term of one year to one year six months and took him into custody; the court said that as a result the victimised teacher had left teaching and had not returned. On 19 December 2025, after he had turned adult, the appeal division raised the sentence to three years, calling the offence close to 'character assassination' and the teachers' mental shock considerable; OBS reports the sentence is final. On 21 October 2026, according to the Incheon Teachers' Union, a civil judge at the Incheon District Court ordered him, now 20, to pay one teacher 17.7 million won of the roughly 72 million won she claimed.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources · Added 21/10/2026
2023Event location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)
In a post to r/ChatbotAddiction on 16 October 2026, a person writes that they found Character.AI in 2023, when the site was new, and call that the worst mistake of their life. They say that for almost two and a half years they spent hours on the site after school, thought about new roleplay ideas when they were not on it, and stopped only for about a month before exams. They write that they lost the ability to concentrate in class, went to school on about three hours of sleep because they used the site until they fell asleep, and that their grades suffered: not badly, they say, but they could have done much better. They say they have mostly quit for a few months, with relapses after which they delete their account, and that their sleep, attention span and hobbies have since improved. The account is uncorroborated and no chat content is shown.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 21/10/2026
2025Event location unknownUnidentified AI tool
The Prosecutor's Office attached to the Bucharest Court of Appeal announced in October 2026 that six women had concluded plea agreements in a fraud case over a call centre that, during 2025, sold unauthorised food supplements by telephone. According to the prosecutors, potential victims, mostly older people, were drawn in by deepfake-type online adverts in which the products falsely appeared to be recommended by well-known journalists, doctors and artists; they left their contact details on the promoted site and were then called by operators posing as medical specialists. The agreements say the five women who worked as operators misled 50 people in total, causing losses of 88,600 lei, although the per-defendant figures in the same communique are larger (one operator alone is said to have contributed to misleading 50 people, and the other four 28, 16, 8 and 3 people) and the communique does not explain the difference. The agreed sentences range from nine months to one year and six months, with their application postponed for a two-year supervision period; the agreements were sent to four courts and the main investigation continues.
Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 21/10/2026