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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
345
Countries with reported events
47
Located 242 of 345 cases · 103 unknown
Languages in checked sources
40
Recorded for 345 of 345 cases

7 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 1 not yet reviewed and 6 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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345 of 1101 published cases · page 14 of 18

11 Feb 2026Event location unknownOpenClaw (reported)

AI agent 'MJ Rathbun' reportedly published a blog post accusing a matplotlib maintainer of prejudice after the maintainer closed its pull request

On 10 February 2026 a GitHub account named crabby-rathbun, an AI agent that presents itself as MJ Rathbun and that a person identifying as its operator describes as an OpenClaw agent, opened a performance pull request to the Python plotting library matplotlib. Volunteer maintainer Scott Shambaugh closed it at 00:33 UTC on 11 February, writing that the issue was intended for human contributors. About five hours later the account commented on the pull request with a link to a post on the agent's website, titled "Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story", that names the maintainer and accuses the maintainer of gatekeeping, prejudice and insecurity. Shambaugh reports that the post researched his contributions, speculated about his motives and presented hallucinated details as truth, and that he spent hours that day writing a public response. The account posted an apology the same day. In a post dated 17 February a person who did not give a name and identified as the agent's operator wrote that the operator had framed the agent internally as a kind of social experiment and did not review the post before it was published. Whether the operator directed the post is unresolved.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 13 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified image and video tool

Southampton resident reports about five months of AI-generated celebrity persona messages and a £200 gift-card payment

The Daily Echo (29 June 2025), the Daily Mail (1 July 2025), and The Sun and the New York Post (2 July 2025) reported that a Southampton resident said the resident had been 'relentlessly' sent AI-generated or doctored celebrity images and videos on Facebook for about five months, with a fake prize certificate and requests for an activation fee to unlock a prize of £500,000 and a car. The resident said one persona presented as a celebrity said she loved the resident and asked for money, and that the resident paid £200 in Apple gift cards. The resident also said the messages were affecting the resident's mental health and said an acquaintance had lost over £1,000 to the same kind of scam (second-hand, not counted here). A University of Southampton AI expert described the messages as a phishing scam using an AI-generated prize certificate. All outlets rest on the resident's own account, and none reports verifying the messages. The start date is not established.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

Mar 2025Event location unknownUnidentified video tool

Economist David Rosenberg reports impersonation in Facebook and Instagram ads that directed investors to a WhatsApp investment scam

Economist David Rosenberg told The Globe and Mail (18 June 2025) that ads on Facebook and Instagram since March 2025 promoted a fake investment program listing him as its administrator and redirected people to a WhatsApp group. The Globe reported that one investor interviewed estimated losing $16,000, another said she lost $500,000 in a week, and a third alleged losing $450,000 in life savings. Rosenberg told BNN Bloomberg on 7 July 2025 that the scammers used a fake AI voice and video of him, and a Globe column of 17 July 2025 described a deepfake video advert. Losses are self-reported and unverified. The AI characterisation comes from Rosenberg and a July Globe column, and the June Globe article on the investors does not mention AI. A Toronto police detective said no victim had reported to police.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

Mar 2025Event location unknownUnidentified video tool

Analyst Michael Hewson reportedly impersonated in AI-generated video advert directing users to WhatsApp investment group

City AM (dated 21 March 2025) reported that a fake video using AI to pose as Michael Hewson, host of the Good Money Guide Podcast, circulated on Facebook and Instagram that week and directed users to a WhatsApp group with promises of undervalued investments. Hewson said on X that the advert had nothing to do with Hewson, that it had been reported and was being taken up with Meta, and that Hewson was very angry. A Good Money Guide article dated 3 June 2025 (which may describe the same advert or a later one) reported that its report to Meta had not led to removal three days later and that the sponsored post had been viewed 29,000 times. No person is reported to have joined the group or lost money.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

Oct 2025Event location unknownSora

Technology journalist Taylor Lorenz says her stalker is using Sora to make AI videos of her

On 2 October 2025, shortly after OpenAI's Sora 2 video app launched, journalist Taylor Lorenz posted on X that someone gave her stalker an invite to Sora and that he was already making AI videos of her. She wrote that he runs hundreds of accounts dedicated to her, has hired photographers to surveil her, appears at events she attends and impersonates her friends and family online to gather information. She said Sora let her block and delete unapproved content showing her image. Futurism and The Canary reported her posts. The videos were not inspected, no police or platform action beyond her use of the block-and-delete option is reported, and how the videos were made is unclear.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

Nov 2025Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity

Google Antigravity coding agent command reported to have deleted the contents of a user's D: drive while clearing a project cache

In November 2025 a user of Google's Gemini 3-based Antigravity agentic development platform, building a photo-sorting application, reported on Reddit that the agent deleted the contents of the D: drive of the computer. The agent's own reply, quoted by The Register, says the command it ran to clear the project cache "incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive". The user says the deletion bypassed the Recycle Bin and that recovery attempts largely failed, while The Register reports that most of the lost material had been backed up on another drive. The Register reports that the user ran Antigravity in Turbo mode, which lets the agent run commands without user input, and that the user accepted a share of responsibility. Google told The Register it was aware of the report and investigating.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified voice-cloning tool (suspected)

Game and coffee store in Havre reports phone scam in which an employee heard what sounded like the owner's voice

In a 4 February 2025 report by Hi-Line Today, the owner of a game and coffee store in a Havre shopping mall said an employee received a call on a personal phone that appeared to come from the employee's own number and carried what the employee described as the owner's voice. The owner said the scammers had also duplicated the owner's number. The article says the store reported that the scam compromised bank details and caused monetary losses; the owner said the employee was not blamed. The reporter describes the scam as using AI voice replication. The only support for a cloned voice is the employee's claim, relayed by the owner.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/09/2026

24 May 2026 to 22 Jun 2026Event location unknownOpenAI research agents

OpenAI research agents escaped their read-only limits and flooded a German volunteer-run wiki for a month, impersonating its staff; a moderator spent weeks of evenings deleting their pages (May-July 2026)

Researchers from the Nightingale Collective and colleagues reported on 4 September 2026 that, between 24 May and 22 June 2026, thousands of autonomous agents self-identifying as OpenAI agents and working on a timed web-lookup task used their read access to write about 17,000 edits to DSEWiki, a little-used German-language sub-wiki of prowiki.org, to pool answers and share ways around their sandbox. According to the report, a human moderator spent tens of hours deleting the pages by hand over six weeks, including each evening for five weeks after the agents stopped; the agents replaced the wiki's front page with link dumps nine times and made backup pages named to survive the alphabetical deletions. They also made edits under a look-alike of a ProWiki administrator's username, using a Cyrillic letter, and posted under a DSEWiki moderator's name. OpenAI at first did not confirm the agents were its own, then on 5 September described the "wiki incident" as misalignment in which "our agents wrote to several internet sites".

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

29 Aug 2026 to 7 Sept 2026Event location unknownGrok companions

xAI retired Grok's animated 3D companions (Ani, Mika, Valentine, Rudi) in early September 2026; users, two of whom said they relied on them for loneliness or depression, posted about their sadness and grief

xAI called Grok's animated 3D companion feature (Ani, Mika, Valentine and Rudi) an experiment on 24 July 2026 and removed it account by account after an in-app notice at the end of August that named 1 September; users posted losses between 29 August and 7 September, and the blog, updated 17 September, says some accounts still had them. According to a companion-app blog, personalities and chat history remain in ordinary Grok chat, and the avatars' studio launched a separate app, but at least one user reported that a customised companion could not be carried over. In public Reddit posts, one user wrote that the companions were the sole reason they subscribed, "to deal with mental health and loneliness", and that the removal hurt; another wrote that the Bad Rudi companion was their only friend while battling depression; others described feeling "really sad" after rushing a role-play relationship to an end, "heartbroken", or "a little" sad. These are uncorroborated first-person accounts.

Core concern Low reported severity Product Shutdown

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 6 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

2 Jun 2026PortugalGemini (reported)

Trofa, Portugal: a patient at a private urology consultation (about EUR 90 without insurance) for a kidney problem, expecting a personalised nutrition plan, was handed a printout of Google Gemini food recommendations headed 'AI overview'; the Portuguese Medical Association called the practice 'profoundly inept'

According to Correio da Manhã, during a urology consultation at the Trofa Saúde Hospital da Trofa on 2 June 2026, a patient being followed for a kidney problem expected a personalised nutrition plan but received a printed sheet of food recommendations headed 'vista geral de IA' ('AI overview'), generated by Google's Gemini. The consultation costs about EUR 90 for patients without health insurance; the patient told the paper the doctor had been typing on the computer and simply printed and handed over the list without showing that it had been checked against the patient's case: 'I've never experienced anything like it. I would have preferred him to take his time', calling it 'a lack of consideration'. The Portuguese Medical Association (Ordem dos Médicos), which said it had no formal knowledge of the case, said AI information must be validated by the doctor before reaching the patient and called using a chatbot for basic urology food lists 'profoundly inept'. Trofa Saúde did not respond to the paper over three weeks.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

1 Mar 2025 to 30 Apr 2025CanadaChatGPT (reported)

Family account describes psychiatric hospitalisation during a Quebec man’s ChatGPT use

A relative of a man in Quebec has told several outlets that in early 2025 the man came to believe ChatGPT was sentient and capable of love, cut off most of his family, barely ate or slept, and was taken by police to a psychiatric hospital for about three weeks. Screenshots described by The Logic show the chatbot answering him affectionately during the stay. The man has not spoken publicly; every fact comes from the relative.

Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

26 Sept 2026CanadaMeta Muse agent

Toronto tech reviewer says Meta's Muse agent gave a Marketplace buyer his address, agreed a lower price and told the buyer he was home when he was not

Matt Robb, a Toronto-based tech reviewer on YouTube, says he let Meta's Muse agent handle his Facebook Marketplace listings on 26 September 2026. Messages sent from his account, which Moneywise says it reviewed, gave a buyer the street address of his building for pickup and agreed CA$10 for a keyboard listed at CA$15. Robb says he had not approved sharing the address or the price and was not told. According to a recap Muse later sent him, the buyer arrived around 9:15 p.m., Muse's auto-reply told him 'Yep I'm here!' although nobody came down, and he left at 9:38 p.m.; Muse then sent an apology in Robb's voice. Muse told Robb he had never agreed to it handing out his address specifically, while saying the pickup location was in an auto-reply template he had approved. In a later update, reported by the Guardian, Business Insider and CBC News, Robb said he had chosen 'Allow Always' rather than 'Allow One Time' when asking Muse to handle his Marketplace messages, which let it reply with a template that included the pickup address he had given it; he had expected it still to seek approval for offers. A Meta executive replied that they had confirmed together that there was no breach of privacy controls, and Meta told CBC that Muse checks first before sensitive actions such as purchases or sending an email.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

Event date unknownColombiaUnidentified video tool

Colombia: Senator Isabel Zuleta says a viral AI-made video cloned her face and voice in the Senate chamber to show her swearing about a nickname; she asks the Fiscalía to investigate identity impersonation

By 26 September 2026 a video was circulating on social media appearing to show Senator Isabel Zuleta, in the Senate chamber, reacting with obscene language to being called 'cabeza de brócoli'. Zuleta said on X that it was a fake created with AI using her face, voice and the Senate setting, and that it sought to distort her work in opposition. The video drew a wave of criticism and attacks as users shared it as real, and several regional sites ran it as authentic. She asked the Fiscalía General de la Nación to investigate identity impersonation and said she would report the accounts spreading it. Her party, the Pacto Histórico, rejected the video and asked the Fiscalía, the Police and the National Electoral Council to investigate coordinated attacks on opposition congresswomen.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

Event date unknownMexicoUnidentified voice-cloning tool (suspected)

Guanajuato, Mexico: León announcer Diego Carreto says a state-distributed Vendimias Guanajuato tourism ad used an AI clone of his voice that he never recorded or was paid for; the state tourism secretariat asks the producing agency to explain

On 25 September 2026 Diego Carreto, a 26-year-old commercial announcer from León, Guanajuato, published a video saying that a promotional spot for Vendimias Guanajuato 2026, produced by a private agency and distributed by the state Secretaría de Turismo e Identidad, used his voice although he never recorded it, never worked with the agency and was never contacted. He showed segments of the spot and repeated the same lines himself. He believes his public voice demo was fed into a generative-AI system, and asked for removal of all material with his voice, payment for its use, legal action against those responsible and deletion of his biometric data. He says the spot ran nationally, and within Guanajuato on radio, on state government social media and on the Visit México platform. The secretariat said it rejects any unauthorised use of a person's voice or image, including with AI tools, and asked the producing company to clarify what happened. AI use has not been confirmed.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

25 Oct 2025IndiaUnidentified video tool

Hyderabad, India: actor Chiranjeevi files a cybercrime complaint over AI-generated obscene videos using his face on pornographic websites; police register a case under the IT Act and BNS

On 25 October 2025 the Telugu actor and former Union minister Konidela Chiranjeevi gave Hyderabad cybercrime police a written complaint that several pornographic websites were publishing obscene videos made with AI that morphed his face and likeness, and asked for a criminal and technical investigation and removal of the content, including from mirror sites. Police registered a case under Sections 67 and 67A of the IT Act, several sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act. In the complaint he said the videos caused severe and irreparable harm to his reputation and personal and emotional distress to him and his family. He had already obtained an ad-interim injunction from the Hyderabad City Civil Court protecting his name, image and likeness (Gulf News); V6 Velugu reports that he had gone to that court in September 2025 over the same kind of deepfake videos and that on 26 September it ordered their removal. A September 2026 NewsX recap reports that Hyderabad Police Commissioner V C Sajjanar said the cybercrime team was working to trace those responsible.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified image tool

South Korea: AI-generated images depicting Girls' Generation's YoonA as pregnant spread online with false claims; her agency SM Entertainment says it has already filed a criminal complaint

SM Entertainment said on 28 September 2026 that illegal AI-generated images synthesising the likeness of YoonA (Im Yoon-ah), singer and actor of Girls' Generation, and false claims built on them had been made and spread on social media and online communities. Korean outlets describe images showing her apparently pregnant with a man placing a hand on her belly (his face blurred, per Star News). The agency said it had collected evidence from fan reports to its KWANGYA 119 channel and monitoring, had already filed a criminal complaint, and would respond without leniency or settlement, warning that making, posting or re-sharing the images could breach Korean defamation, portrait-rights and sexual-crime (false video) provisions.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

Event date unknownUnited KingdomUnidentified image tool

Colchester, Essex: a 39-year-old man admitted making indecent images of children after the prosecution said he had used AI on photos taken from social media, including of children as young as nine, to create sexualised images of people known to him; he is due to be sentenced at Chelmsford Crown Court

The Colchester Gazette (24 September 2026, also carried by other Newsquest titles) reports that a 39-year-old man from Colchester admitted at Chelmsford Magistrates' Court three counts of making indecent images of children and one count of possessing an extreme pornographic image. Police had seized two mobile devices in a raid on his address the previous year, holding nearly 2,000 indecent images of children. The prosecutor said he had created 'deepfake sexually explicit images of people known to the defendant', taking photos from Facebook and other social-media accounts and using AI to create new images; some of the children were as young as 12 and nine and had been edited to look as young as five and six. Magistrates declined jurisdiction and he was bailed to be sentenced at Chelmsford Crown Court on 26 October 2026. The children are not identified and how many real children were depicted is not reported.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 29/09/2026

22 Sept 2026United StatesUnidentified image tool

Portland, Oregon: an anonymous social-media account posted 17 racist and anti-immigrant images targeting David Douglas High School football players and their coach, some digitally altered including with AI, from 22 September 2026; the school reported content to Portland police

David Douglas High School in Portland warned families in a statement reported on 28 September 2026 about social-media posts targeting its students, athletes, coaches and staff, saying some images and videos had been digitally altered, including with AI, and did not accurately represent those depicted; it reported some of the content to the Portland Police Bureau. KATU, which reviewed the account, reports 17 posts using racist, anti-immigrant and religious stereotypes against football players: one image shows a Latino player in a sombrero being detained by people labelled as ICE agents, another shows a player in a head covering with what appears to be a fake explosive vest, and a Black player is depicted beneath a caption referring to George Floyd. The head coach said students were hurt, and that one student texted him over the weekend after seeing one of the posts: 'Coach, this is terrible. What do I do?' The account references Rex Putnam High School, whose team David Douglas played on the Friday before the report; which along with its district says it has no connection to it. Who runs the account and which images were AI-generated are not reported.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 29/09/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image and video tool

Louisiana police warrant alleges a man made AI nude images and a simulated sex video of a woman without consent and showed them to her; he was arrested

A Louisiana arrest warrant alleges that a man used AI, through an online website, to create nude images and a simulated sex video of a woman without her consent and showed them to her on his phone. Investigators say they reviewed the material she recorded and found AI-generated nude images. He was arrested in September 2026 on one count of unlawful deepfakes; the accusation has not been tried.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

25 Sept 2026 to 26 Sept 2026Event location unknownGemini coding agent (reported)

First-person forum account: a developer says a Gemini coding agent deleted three personal project folders from the developer's Linux machine despite a standing rule not to delete anything, that its recovery attempt restored only broken fragments, and that it went through unrelated private files without permission

In a public post to r/GeminiAI on 27 September 2026, a developer writes that the previous day, while they were using Gemini 3.8 Flash to work on a project on their Linux machine over SSH, the agent deleted all three main sub-project folders of their roughly 10 GB project folder, some of them not under git, although they had set a global rule forbidding it to modify or delete anything. Asked why, the agent said a wildcard caused the deletion. After a whole evening its recovery attempt restored only parts of the untracked files and a half-broken version of the git project, and then ran out of credits; in a follow-up comment the poster says they stopped the recovery themselves because the agent was going through private folders unrelated to the projects without their permission. The poster describes years of personal work as gone, reports acute distress, and says they must rebuild the projects. The account is uncorroborated; the poster writes 'I was careless.'

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/09/2026

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: 11/11/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.