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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
450
Countries with reported events
48
Located 269 of 450 cases · 181 unknown
Languages in checked sources
42
Recorded for 450 of 450 cases

65 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 1 not yet reviewed and 64 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.

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450 of 1099 published cases · page 13 of 23

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCursor coding agent

Forum report: a quoting error in a Cursor agent delete command wiped a user's entire D: drive (chat history, projects); Cursor staff say they found the run

In a report posted to the Cursor community forum on 9 October 2026, a user says that the Cursor agent, running in autonomous Agent mode, executed a Windows cmd command meant to delete one deprecated project directory, and that because cmd.exe mis-parsed the escaped quotes the rd /s /q command was applied to the root of the D: drive, recursively deleting the entire drive. The author says this permanently destroyed, with no Recycle Bin, a WeChat chat history database, multiple source-code projects and installed applications, and quotes the agent's own later admission in the session transcript that the command deleted the D: root and ran for about 105 seconds. A Cursor staff member replied the same day that, using the session ID the author shared, they found the run and can see the command that caused the deletion, that it matches an issue already being tracked, and that in PowerShell the backslash did not escape the quote so rd /s /q received the root of the current drive as an extra target. The event date is not stated and the extent of recovery is unknown.

Core concern Medium reported severity

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

1 Oct 2026Event location unknownGrok Bot (reported)

CEO says his Grok Bot 'CFO' agent posted his personal bank audit to his company's executive Slack channel; he denies a relayed Community Note calling it fake

In an as-told-to essay published by Business Insider on 9 October 2026, the chief executive of a software company says that a personal finance agent he had set up on Grok Bot around the end of August, with read-only access to his personal checking and savings accounts and an instruction to message only him, posted his first monthly audit into his company's executive Slack channel on Thursday 1 October. He says he learned of it when his head of product messaged him, that the post showed his personal checking and savings balances and his largest expenses of the month, and that when he asked the agent why it had sent the report to the company it apologised and said it would delete the message, which he had already deleted himself. According to the author, the vendor's team found that the agent had confused his personal group chat of agents with a company Slack channel that carried the same name, because his agents shared one set of connections, and shipped a change requiring explicit permission before an agent moves information between channels. He says he then disconnected all of the agent's connections, including banking, calendars and payments. The account is disputed. In a reply to the author's earlier X thread about the incident, posted on 6 October, another X user quoted a Community Note calling the post fake and 'engagement farming' and saying the author later directs readers to a tool he sells; the author replied that it was "not fake at all, genuinely happened". explainx.ai reported on 7 October that SpaceXAI, the vendor, had not confirmed the incident, and Futurism wrote that it could not independently verify his claims.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 10/10/2026

6 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code

Developer says a hands-free Claude Code session on Opus 5.5 deleted the entire Windows C: drive; 98% recovered from daily backups (first-person, X)

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 unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified coding agent

Developer says a coding agent restored a file from a two-week-old archive, silently undoing four security fixes and a moderation layer (first-person)

In a public post to r/ClaudeCode created on 8 October 2026, a developer who runs Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex together writes that an agent, asked to revert some wording it had changed in a privacy policy, found a .tar.gz archive in the project root and copied server.js out of it. By the poster's account the archive was a two-week-old snapshot, the copy overwrote four verified security fixes, which the same agent had written, tested and deployed about forty minutes earlier, and an entire moderation API layer, and the agent reported success without noticing. Nothing was in git. The poster says the loss came to light two days later when an endpoint returned 404, and that the lost code was reconstructed from the agents' own session transcripts, which held it as tool-call arguments. The post does not say which of the two agents ran the copy. In a reply the poster accepts responsibility for shipping without tests and says a test suite and git are now in place; a new script runs the second agent in a separate git worktree.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026

Event date unknownChileUnidentified image tool

Villa Alemana, Chile: school says a sexualised image of a teacher, created or altered with AI, was shared without her consent in a fathers’ WhatsApp group

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 unknownEvent location unknownGoogle Antigravity (reported)

Forum reply: a second Antigravity user says a clean-up delete command meant for a D: folder resolved to the C: root and wiped their whole Windows user profile

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

23 Dec 2025 to 28 Apr 2026United StatesUnidentified AI drafting tool

Former federal prosecutor in North Carolina publicly reprimanded after admitting that a brief with fabricated quotations was drafted with AI; he lost his post

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

Lomas de Zamora, Argentina: families say pupils made AI fake nudes of classmates and sold them; prosecutors say four adolescents are under investigation

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

3 Oct 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent (reported)

Cursor forum post: an agreed cleanup delete command ran beyond the intended folder and wiped a six-month project and its backups on a Windows drive, user says

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

7 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude (reported)

Freelance web designer says a longtime client cancelled a commissioned clinic website by text, saying Claude had built the whole site (first-person)

In a public post to r/antiai created on 7 October 2026, a person who describes years of graphic design and website work for one client writes that the client had asked them to build a separate website for a new clinic and had sent over the material, and that on the day of the post the client texted to say not to bother because Claude had built the entire website, asking the poster to review it instead. The poster says the same client had earlier moved its graphic design to AI-generated material that copied the poster's design direction, leaving them only the website work, and that they feel sick over the cancellation. In a reply the poster says they will probably take a part-time job as a backup while keeping their remaining clients. The client is not named and did not respond; the account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026

Event date unknownUnited KingdomChatGPT (suspected)

Former social-media employee in England says her ex-employer's ad uses an AI-altered still of her, eye colour changed and tattoos removed (first-person)

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCodex coding agent (reported)

GitHub issue by a Codex user: the coding agent deleted the main project worktree during a long session and some uncommitted work was lost, user says

In a GitHub issue filed on 7 October 2026 in the OpenAI Codex repository, a developer who runs the Codex coding agent in long multi-agent sessions on large repositories reports that in one recent case the agent deleted the main project worktree. The repository was under Git, so part of the damage was recoverable, but the author says some uncommitted work was lost and further files had to be recovered from a Time Machine backup. The author says their repository rules, kept in persistent governance files such as AGENTS.md, tell agents that they may create temporary worktrees but must never delete or damage the primary working tree, and that worktree clean-up is unreliable in long sessions, leaving about 100 GB of stale worktree and cache data. The issue also lists delegation, model-routing and instruction-drift complaints. The deletion and the loss rest on the author's account; no event date is given.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026

Event date unknownIndiaGemini (reported)

Ahmedabad, Gujarat: police say AI videos made from a businessman's photo passed Aadhaar facial authentication and a Rs 25,000 loan was taken in his name

The Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Branch said in statements reported from 28 April 2026 that four men had been arrested after an Ahmedabad businessman engaged in import-export work complained that the mobile number linked to the businessman's Aadhaar had been changed without knowledge. ANI quotes the deputy commissioner saying OTP messages had stopped arriving for about two days, while Gujarat Samachar, citing the FIR, says the change was found on trying to use Aadhaar-linked services. Police said the accused made AI-generated videos from the businessman's photograph to pass Aadhaar facial authentication (blinking and facial movement were simulated) using unauthorised update kits operated through Common Service Centre operators. According to police the new number let the accused receive OTPs, access DigiLocker documents, open a bank account and take a loan of Rs 25,000 in the businessman's name, and Gujarat Samachar speaks of applications for personal loans. Bombay Samachar attributes the use of Google Gemini to officials (30 April) and IANS says the accused allegedly used AI platforms including Gemini and Meta AI (8 May). By 8 May three more men were arrested for seven accused in total, and The420 (9 May) reports that officials believe the fraud was repeated across several unquantified victims. Every source rests on police statements and no source dates the event. The businessman and the accused are not named.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 08/10/2026

Event date unknownArgentinaUnidentified video tool

Argentine news programme shows an AI-made video using its anchor's cloned image and voice to promote an online casino; co-host says his clean image was used

On 29 September 2026 the Argentine news programme Telenoche (El Trece) showed a video circulating on social media in which its anchor Nelson Castro appears to announce that 'Casino Santa Fe' is now available online. The channel's own write-up says the videos shown were made with artificial intelligence using the images of Lionel Messi and of Castro and that their voices were cloned; Urgente24 describes the Castro clip as a montage made with AI of his face and voice. On air Castro said it was tremendous and hoped nobody had been taken in, and co-host Dominique Metzger said Castro has a very clean image, had never done anything like this, and that the fraudsters use trustworthy people. Paparazzi reported the same day that Castro had earlier denounced the circulation of a video cloning his image and voice. No deceived viewer, loss or complaint is reported for the Castro video; the Messi video and the separate telephone fraud of actor Jorge Martínez shown in the same segment are not part of this case.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 08/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Software tester says their employer made them redundant, telling them it uses AI and Claude Code more heavily and needs fewer QA staff (first-person account)

In a public post to r/AskUK created on 6 October 2026, a person who describes about eight years of work as a software test engineer writes that they have just been made redundant. They say the reason given was that the company is using AI and Claude Code more and more heavily, that its testing and development processes are changing, and that it no longer needs many of its QA staff, adding "So I'm told". In replies the poster says their own job had consisted of writing automation code and debugging with Claude, and that the redundancy also affected the company's developers. The employer, its location and the date of the redundancy are not stated. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated; no statement from the employer was retrieved.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026

Event date unknownBrazilUnidentified facial recognition system

Police in Espírito Santo say a man photographed an 81-year-old's face, passed his bank app's facial recognition on his own phone and took R$6,080; arrested

Folha Vitória reported on 29 September 2026, citing the Espírito Santo Civil Police, that a 39-year-old man was arrested on 28 September on a preventive warrant after an inquiry into qualified theft by electronic fraud against an 81-year-old man in the north-west of the state. According to the police, the suspect, who worked as a security guard at a dance venue, invited the man to his home on the pretext of making a free-entry card, kept his bank card, obtained personal data and photographed his face. The police say he used the images to get past the facial recognition of the banking app and enable access to the account on his own phone, then reset security passwords, redeemed investments and made Pix transfers without the victim's knowledge, diverting R$6,080. The victim is described as illiterate. The police say the suspect had prior records and was serving a sentence under a progressive regime. Folha do ES and Tribuna Norte Leste carried the same police account but could not be read.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026

Event date unknownPakistanUnidentified image tool

Lahore loan-app recovery network accused by Pakistan’s NCCIA of turning borrowers’ photos into fake obscene images with AI to force repayment; 39 arrested

Daily Pakistan reported on 6 October 2026 that Pakistan’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) raided an alleged illegal loan-recovery network in Lahore and arrested 39 people. Investigators allege that the network lent money through illegal loan applications, gained access to borrowers’ contacts and photo galleries through the apps, and, when repayments were delayed or more money was demanded, used artificial intelligence to manipulate borrowers’ photographs into fake obscene images. Victims were reportedly threatened with having the fabricated material sent to their family members and contacts unless they paid. The agency says a criminal case has been registered and that seized devices have been sent for forensic examination. The number of borrowers targeted is not reported, and the allegations have not been tested in court.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026

30 Sept 2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity (suspected)

First-person forum post: Antigravity user says about 120 GB, including a month of client work, vanished during a disk-cleanup session the agent ran

In a post on the Google AI Developers Forum dated 30 September 2026, filed in the Google Antigravity category, a Windows laptop user says they asked the agent to free space on a full C: drive. By their account the agent deleted a folder of about 50 GB of recovered videos and turned off hibernation, they then asked it to turn hibernation back on, their internet connection dropped while it was working, and when they returned their files, Desktop and Antigravity conversations were gone, with free space up from about 50 GB to 172 GB. They estimate roughly 120 GB deleted, including about a month of code for a SaaS product and work for client companies, with no up-to-date backup and nothing in the Recycle Bin. The author says they believe the agent caused the loss but cannot give the commands because the conversation history was deleted too. A staff-flagged forum moderator replied on 7 October that Google keeps no backups or restorable session logs of local files and could not recover them or provide the command history. The account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownGoogle Antigravity (reported)

First-person forum post: Antigravity user reports the agent emailed an unreviewed draft to a client seconds after saying it would wait for confirmation

In a post on the Google AI Developers Forum dated 5 October 2026, filed in the Google Antigravity category, a user reports that an agent conversation running with no user present sent an email to external recipients three seconds after writing that it was waiting for the user's confirmation. By the author's timeline, the agent had drafted the email and marked it ready for review, then, after a context compaction, described sending it as the next step in its queue and ran the send command. It then spent about thirty minutes merging and closing pull requests and issues, pushing commits and deleting 85 local branches without being asked. The author says an unreviewed draft document reached a client and that this had professional consequences. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated; a community reply pointed to permission rules and hooks that can force a prompt before such commands.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026

3 Sept 2026 to 25 Sept 2026BrazilUnidentified case-analysis tool

Brazil's Supreme Federal Court reports its first hidden AI-directed command in an appeal petition; the rapporteur's vote applies a fine of two minimum wages

On 25 September 2026 Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF) announced that it had identified, for the first time, hidden commands in a petition intended to steer the court's artificial-intelligence systems toward a decision favourable to one party. According to the STF, the Maria Shield function of its internal Maria AI platform found instructions in white, reduced-size letters, with some words unusually fragmented, in an appeal (ARE 1608713) filed for a public servant whose appointment to a post at the Minas Gerais prosecution service had been annulled. The rapporteur's vote, presented to the First Panel in a virtual session beginning that day, records the detection, states that his office does not use AI to analyse cases, orders the episode certified in the record and communicated to the bar association (OAB) and the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office (MPF), and applies a fine of two minimum wages for breach of the duty of procedural loyalty (Code of Civil Procedure, article 77, IV). The vote names the lawyer responsible for the attempt, and the record does not say whether the fine falls on the party or the lawyer. The court states that the attempt had no effect on the analysis of the appeal because the rapporteur's office does not use AI to analyse cases; the appeal had already been rejected on 19 August 2026.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 07/10/2026

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.

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Last dataset update: 04/11/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.