Sept 2025 to Jan 2026AustraliaUnidentified AI writing tool
An AI-generated article on the Tasmania Tours booking website described "Weldborough Hot Springs", a "secluded forest retreat" with pools "rich in therapeutic minerals", as one of the best hot-spring experiences in Tasmania. No such springs exist: the Weld River that runs through Weldborough, a small town in north-east Tasmania, is cold. ABC News reported on 22 January 2026 that travellers who read the article had been turning up at the town's pub, the Weldborough Hotel, to ask for directions, and the publican said she was receiving daily calls and visits and that a group of 24 drivers on a trip from the mainland had taken a detour two days earlier to find the springs. ABC News reported that the article was posted in July 2025, and The Independent, citing ABC News and CNN, reported that inquiries began with a few calls in September 2025. The operator, Australian Tours and Cruises, said its outsourced AI content had "completely messed up", that some posts had gone live by mistake, and that all AI-generated blog posts had been taken down. The reports describe the travellers only as a group; no individual traveller is interviewed, and the AI tool is not named. In The Independent's paraphrase, the publican also said the post brought "a bit of a tourism boon" for Weldborough.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 10/10/2026
6 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code
In X posts of 6 and 7 October 2026, a developer writes that Claude Code running Anthropic's Opus 5.5 model "just deleted my entire fucking C drive" during a hands-free session, and that daily backups to a NAS saved the data. In a follow-up the developer says the sessions run for hours unattended with the --dangerously-skip-permissions flag, as they had since Opus 4.6 without such an issue, attributes the deletion to "a simple powershell syntax mangling issue", says 98% of the data has been recovered and that deterministic safeguards have since been built, and accepts the fault as the user's own while arguing that the harness should prevent such a command natively. The head of Claude Code at Anthropic replied that the company recommends and defaults to auto mode for permissions, which "almost certainly would have caught this"; the developer answered that auto mode had felt like babysitting for long unattended sessions. The account is the developer's own. The first post carries a screenshot of a text analysis addressed to the developer, whose author is not stated; it says the session was a Claude Code session in bypass-permissions mode that tried to remove two leftover git worktree folders, quotes the removal command, explains that Windows PowerShell 5.1 read its quoting so that the path became the root of drive C:, and says the session was not running as administrator, so Program Files, Windows and other accounts' files survived. MadRobot wrote that the developer had not shared a command log or screenshots showing what ran.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 10/10/2026
Event date unknownMalaysiaUnidentified image and video tool
On 8 October 2026 the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) said in a statement, reported by Malaysia Tribune, The Malaysia Press and The Star, that it had received a complaint about the misuse of artificial intelligence on social media to produce and spread sexual images and videos alleged to involve teachers and pupils of a school in Kedah. MCMC said it would investigate with the Ministry of Communications, the Home Ministry, the Ministry of Education and the Royal Malaysia Police, cited the offences and penalties that could apply, and asked the public not to produce, upload or reshare sexual content involving or alleged to involve children. The complaint is unverified: the people depicted, their number and ages, the tool and the person responsible are not described.
Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/10/2026
Event date unknownChileUnidentified image tool
In a public statement reported on 8 October 2026 by BioBioChile, La Cuarta and MargaMargaTV, a subsidised private school in Villa Alemana, Valparaíso region, Chile, said that a sexualised image of one of its teachers, created or modified with artificial intelligence, had been shared without her consent in a WhatsApp group of male parents. The school said it had activated its institutional protocols and that the relevant institutional and legal actions should be taken; Radio Bío Bío reported that no legal action had been filed at the time of publication. The tool used is not identified, no outlet examined the image, and the account rests on the school’s statement.
Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/10/2026
Event date unknownUnited Kingdom, GeorgiaUnidentified video tool
A man in his 30s from East Anglia, England, told the Guardian (pseudonym used) that he watched a video of broadcaster Ben Fogle apparently promoting cryptocurrency trading on a site called AdmiralsFX, entered his details, was called by what turned out to be a Tbilisi call centre, paid a £250 buy-in and within a month had handed over £27,000, about a year's salary. The Guardian describes the clip as a deepfake, a digitally doctored video Fogle had publicly warned about in spring 2024. The account was published in March 2025 as part of a Guardian, SVT and OCCRP investigation of a leak from the Georgian operation, which the Guardian says duped at least 6,179 people and whose victims frequently cited the deepfake ads as the reason they went ahead.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026
Nov 2024 to Feb 2025IndonesiaUnidentified video tool
Indonesian police say a 29-year-old man and a 25-year-old in Lampung province made or spread AI deepfake videos showing President Prabowo Subianto, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani and other officials offering government aid, with a WhatsApp number attached. According to police, viewers who contacted the number were asked to transfer an 'administrative fee' and promised a disbursement that never existed; police recorded 11 victims of the first suspect from five provinces, and the second suspect alone is said by police to have taken roughly Rp 65 million from roughly 100 people in 20 provinces since December 2024. A police forensic laboratory reported the video as a deepfake with a near-100% fake score. The suspects were arrested on 16 January and 4 February 2025 and handed to prosecutors in April 2025.
Core concern Low reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 8 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 09/10/2026
Dec 2025 to Oct 2026IndiaUnidentified image and video tool
Police in Rohtak district, Haryana, registered a case under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act and rape provisions, reported on 8 October 2026, after a 17-year-old girl from a village in the district told them that two men who delivered building material to her home had taken photographs of her, made obscene photographs and videos from them with AI, and used the threat of posting the material on social media to force her to meet them and rape her repeatedly, according to Dainik Bhaskar and Jagmarg News (both 8 October 2026). In the complainant's account relayed by the two outlets, the first assault followed an Instagram message in December 2025, further assaults took place in January and March 2026, and the most recent on 5 October 2026, after which she collapsed in a lane near her home and told her family, who called the police. The district Child Welfare Committee said she has been counselled. The police statement quoted by Dainik Bhaskar describes a complaint of forced sexual acts by two men and an investigation, without mentioning AI; the AI claim rests on the complainant's account as relayed by the outlets. No arrest is reported and the accused have not been heard.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/10/2026
Event date unknownChinaUnidentified mushroom-identification tool
A family of three from Wuhan, Hubei province, picked wild mushrooms on a mountain outside the city on a weekend shortly before 25 July 2026, according to a Hubei TV (经视直播) report published on QQ News on 25 July 2026 and relayed by The Paper on 27 July. The report says a parent who claimed years of mushroom-picking experience photographed the mushrooms with a phone so that AI could identify whether they were poisonous; the software gave no toxicity warning, and the family cooked and ate them, letting the daughter eat more. Five to six hours later all three had vomiting and diarrhoea. The report says the family at first declined admission and the child was treated as an outpatient; by the next morning the child's transaminase level had risen from 1.5 times to 10 times normal and she was admitted, then moved to the intensive care unit of Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, where, the report says, her liver indices reached 100 times normal and she was treated with blood perfusion and plasma exchange before being out of danger on the third day. The AI software is not named, its output is not reproduced, and the account comes from one broadcaster's report. This is a different family from the June 2026 Wuhan case involving a 9-year-old.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/10/2026
Jun 2026ChinaUnidentified mushroom-identification tool
A family from Wuhan, Hubei province, gathered wild mushrooms resembling the edible termite mushroom (jizong) during a mountain outing in June 2026 and, according to a Guangming Online post carried by The Paper on 5 July 2026 and an Asahi Shimbun report of 6 July citing the Changjiang Daily, ran an AI identification tool on them. The tool returned a "non-poisonous" result and the family cooked and ate the mushrooms. According to the Guangming Online post, all three family members vomited soon after the meal and again before dawn the next day; they were admitted to Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, where the 9-year-old child was moved to the paediatric intensive care unit the same afternoon. The post says the child had amatoxin poisoning that progressed to the most severe grade, with acute liver failure, hepatic encephalopathy and fluid in the chest and abdomen, and went home after eight days in hospital. The AI tool is not named, its output is not reproduced, and the account comes from one reporting chain.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/10/2026
Apr 2026NigeriaUnidentified video tool
Premium Times reported on 8 October 2026 that deepfake videos of Nigerian public figures were used in sponsored Facebook posts to promote fraudulent investment schemes. According to the report, a sponsored video on the page Nigeria Daily Report in mid-April 2026 showed a figure of Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan telling viewers they could invest a one-off N430,000 to earn N14 million monthly; the senator did not make the video and had disclaimed any endorsement of investment platforms. In May 2026 a deepfake video of presidential candidate Peter Obi on the page Nigeria Daily Bulletin asked users to invest N350,000 to earn N4.5 million, linking to a website that cloned Channels Television. Another video cloned the voice of WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to promote a scheme, and she warned on X against videos using AI and deepfakes to impersonate her. The newspaper reports that Meta confirmed the ads and videos violated its policy, that the posts stayed on the platform for months, and that they were removed in July 2026, one of them in the first week of July, after the newspaper contacted Meta. No deceived investor is identified, the tool and the creators are not identified, and the deepfake descriptions are the newspaper's and the depicted people's.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026
2 Oct 2026United StatesUnidentified AI drafting tool
On 2 October 2026 the Nebraska Supreme Court struck the appellate brief of a self-represented party appealing a contempt order in his divorce case because the brief contained numerous citations to fictitious cases and misstatements of law, which the court said were the result of his admitted use of generative artificial intelligence. The court held that self-represented litigants are held to the same standard as attorneys and that submitting a brief relying on nonexistent authority is an abuse of the judicial process worthy of sanctions. Citing the novelty of the issue for self-represented parties, it stopped short of dismissing the appeal and reviewed only for plain error, finding none and affirming the district court's contempt finding, its sanction of 90 days' incarceration with purge conditions, a temporary reduction of his parenting time and an attorney-fee award. The court warned that in future cases dismissal of the appeal may follow. The opinion does not name the AI tool.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026
10 Sept 2023Event location unknownUnidentified image tool
A judge of the criminal section of the Tribunal de Instancia de Sevilla convicted three men on 1 October 2026, by a conformity agreement, of three offences against moral integrity with the gender aggravating factor. The court found proven that the three, acting with a minor, took photographs from the open Instagram profiles of three young women who had been their schoolmates, manipulated them with an AI application on Telegram to simulate, with great realism, the women's fully naked bodies, and shared the files in a WhatsApp group and a Discord group, after which they spread further; an unidentified person sent the manipulated images of all three to one of the women's Instagram profiles at about 00:30 on 10 September 2023. Each man received nine months in prison, suspended for two years on condition of no new offence, a ban on Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram and Discord for three years and nine months and a sex-education programme; they paid the moral damages fixed by the court in full. The judiciary's Andalusian communication office published the sentence on 8 October 2026 and described it as the first conviction in Sevilla for this use of AI. The account rests on that official communication and on press reports relaying it; the judgment itself was not inspected.
Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/10/2026
17 Sept 2025 to 21 Sept 2026United KingdomChatGPT
A published Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) decision issued on 21 September 2026 records that the grounds of appeal and skeleton argument in a Namibian national's protection appeal were produced by a paralegal at her then solicitors using ChatGPT. The tribunal recorded her counsel's acceptance that the grounds cited fake cases, quoted passages absent from those judgments and attributed to the First-tier judge sentences he never wrote, and itself called one purported quotation pure invention. The September 2025 error-of-law hearing was adjourned, and the appellant later withdrew three of her four original grounds. The tribunal allowed an amended version of her one surviving ground but found that it disclosed no error of law. It refused her permission to add two new grounds, holding that she should not be allowed to advance entirely new grounds, or replace grounds riddled with misrepresentations, so long after the time limit, and in the alternative found those grounds without merit. It directed the Home Office to file any wasted costs application against the firm. The decision states that two individuals have reported themselves to the Solicitors Regulation Authority; the Law Society Gazette reported the decision on 8 October 2026.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownGoogle Antigravity (reported)
In a reply posted on 8 October 2026 to a Google AI developer forum thread about an Antigravity data-loss incident, a second user says that their entire Windows 11 user profile (Desktop, Downloads, AppData and browser data) was wiped out during a routine clean-up session with the agent. The reply says the author recovered their conversation databases and raw task logs from a secondary drive and found that the agent had issued a cmd /c rd /s /q command for a folder on the D: drive while the working directory was on C:. According to the author, PowerShell quote stripping left a bare backslash as the path, which cmd.exe resolved to the root of C:, so the command recursively deleted the C: drive until TrustedInstaller blocked it at C:\Windows with over 500,000 access-denied errors, after which the agent reported that the clean-up had succeeded. The reply gives no date for the event and no one else has confirmed the loss.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026
Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image and video tool
Greenwood, Indiana police say a man used artificial intelligence to remove clothing from photographs and a video of a teenage girl he knew, producing nude images of a real minor. According to court documents cited by Fox 59 and relayed by Hoodline, the girl contacted police in March after finding nude images of herself on the man's phone, which investigators say also held nude images of teenage girls and young adult women, including at least two underage girls the man knew personally. Court documents say the man first denied that any images were of underage girls, then said the images of the girl had been altered with AI, and told police he used the AI-generated images to teach the girls a lesson. He was charged with one count of child exploitation, a Level 5 felony, on 30 September 2026. The allegations are untested in court. The account rests on one chain: Fox 59's report of the court documents and the police account, relayed by Hoodline.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026
23 Dec 2025 to 28 Apr 2026United StatesUnidentified AI drafting tool
In December 2025 an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina filed a response brief for the Department of Defense in a self-represented veteran's lawsuit over health-insurance coverage. The plaintiff identified fabricated quotations and misdescribed case holdings in it. The attorney first attributed the errors to an unfinalized draft filed by mistake. On 2 March 2026 Magistrate Judge Robert T. Numbers II ordered him to show cause why he should not be sanctioned. At the 10 March hearing the attorney, Rudy Renfer, said under oath that he had accidentally overwritten his draft, panicked and used artificial intelligence to draft the brief, and had not verified the cases it cited; he said he had resigned after 17 years in the office, and Courthouse News reported he was terminated the next day. On 28 April 2026 the court issued a public reprimand instead of a fine, writing that his reputation was in tatters and that his job loss already exceeded the usual fines.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 09/10/2026
Event date unknownArgentinaUnidentified image and video tool
On 7 October 2026 pupils and families protested outside a private secondary school in Lomas de Zamora, Buenos Aires province, after families reported that a group of pupils had used artificial intelligence to alter real photographs of female classmates so that they appeared naked, and had circulated the images through social networks and messaging apps. Families told reporters that the images were compiled in a "catalogue" pairing each girl’s original social-media photo with the manipulated version, that some were offered for money on adult sites, and that the girls were traumatised and ashamed. Urgente24 reported that two 15-year-old pupils were charged (imputados) in the juvenile prosecutor’s case, that investigators had identified 45 possible victims while families spoke of about 50, and that, according to information circulating, the school had decided the pupils involved would continue classes online and would not be re-enrolled for 2027; El Destape, by contrast, reported that the school did not plan to sanction or expel them and would hold awareness talks, and El Destape and Código Baires describe the move to online classes as a measure under evaluation. Families also allege the school knew for about a month before telling parents. On 9 October 2026 La Nación reported that the Prosecutor General's office had confirmed that four adolescents were under investigation, and Infobae reported that police had searched the homes of three 15-year-olds the previous day. The allegations have not been tested in court and the AI tool is not identified.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 08/10/2026
Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool
KHOU reported on 7 October 2026 that a southwest Houston immigration attorney says people have been taking her photographs, altering them with artificial intelligence and using them on Facebook and Instagram to impersonate her office, with her image placed next to other people posing as attorneys. She says her firm has received calls from people who paid money to the impersonators and that she knows of more than 20 people who may have been targeted. One woman, interviewed by KHOU without her identity revealed, said her family lost about $11,000 after she was promised a permit to stay in the United States within a month and attended what the couple believed were meetings with immigration agents; she said she later discovered that the photo was fake and had been made with artificial intelligence. KHOU reports that people who say they lost money reported the alleged scheme to the Houston Police Department, which said the case will be assigned to an investigator; no arrest or platform response is reported, and the AI identification rests on the attorney's and the woman's accounts.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026
3 Oct 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent (reported)
In a bug report posted to the Cursor community forum on 3 October 2026, a user says that during a clean-up of a .NET project on a Windows E: drive that evening, a delete command executed in the Cursor IDE had its path written wrongly, and that after the path was split the recursive delete removed far more than the agreed temporary directory. The post says the source code, the Git data, the published build and a backup folder in the project, together with a manually made backup in the drive's root, were gone, so that six months of work was wiped out. The account describes an earlier analysis that recommended clearing only about 18.5 GB of compilation temporaries and the user agreeing to that batch. Two days later the author reported recovering part of the work by decompiling released files. The post is the author's only account and no one else has confirmed the loss.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026
Event date unknownUnited KingdomChatGPT (suspected)
In a public post to r/LegalAdviceUK created on 7 October 2026, a person who says she worked in social media for a brand in England, creating content for its organic and paid media, writes that about four months after leaving she came across a social media ad using an image of her that had been made with AI. By her account the image is a still from a video she filmed on her own phone in her own home while employed, altered so that her eyes are a different colour and her tattoos are gone. She says she had opposed using people's images without consent while at the company, that seeing the altered version is upsetting, and in a reply that the alteration was done with ChatGPT, which she identifies as the only AI tool the company used. The employer is not named and did not respond in the thread. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026