Jul 2026Event location unknownUnidentified video tool
Hirosaki police in Aomori Prefecture, Japan, announced on 8 October 2026 that a man in his 40s living in the prefecture had been defrauded of ¥720,000 through a video, generated with artificial intelligence, of a real celebrity recommending investment, as reported by the Too Nippo newspaper. According to the police account, in about mid-July he followed a TikTok investment advertisement that impersonated a celebrity into LINE and Signal groups, made an initial profit on recommended shares, and then, at the suggestion of a LINE account, installed an investment app and transferred ¥720,000 from a convenience-store ATM to a designated account. When the app bought shares beyond his holdings and demanded the shortfall, he asked an AI, which pointed out that it might be fraud, and he realised he had been deceived. The celebrity and the tool used to make the video are not named.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 11/10/2026
9 Oct 2026PolandUnidentified image tool
On Friday 9 October 2026, at about 13:30, a photograph showing a pupil holding a machete began circulating at a secondary school in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, on a day when police were running stepped-up checks around schools after recent knife attacks in Polish schools. According to the local outlet ePiotrkow.pl, the photograph caused alarm, emergency services responded and found no real threat, and the school director said the image had been altered with artificial intelligence. The pupil shown in the photograph told the director of having fallen victim to an irresponsible joke. Police said they were clarifying the circumstances and warned that causing unnecessary interventions can be punished. Who made the image and with which tool is not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 11/10/2026
Event date unknownArgentinaUnidentified image tool
In La Banda, Santiago del Estero province, Argentina, a woman filed a police complaint on the evening of 8 October 2026 stating that a 15-year-old adolescent, a former classmate of her 15-year-old daughter, had taken photographs of the girl and modified them with artificial-intelligence tools, placing naked bodies on them, and that the images had then been published and spread in WhatsApp groups. Officers of the women's and family community police station and the departmental unit intervened, and the prosecutor ordered the material attached and the file raised to the prosecutor's office for investigation. The account rests on the police report as relayed by the local newspaper Diario Panorama; the tool is not named, and both the girl and the accused are minors.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 10/10/2026
Event date unknownArgentinaUnidentified image and video tool
Girls at a secondary school in the locality of San Pablo, Tucumán province, Argentina, reported in October 2026 that a male classmate had used artificial-intelligence tools to generate about 280 sexual images of them, placing their faces on naked bodies, and that the images circulated in WhatsApp groups and, they later learned, were sold. The families raised the matter with the school, which acknowledged in a communiqué to families that it had received parents concerned about photographs and videos altered with AI showing adolescents' faces on naked female bodies, and announced a listening and formative day for 13 October 2026. Cadena 3 reported, citing 'el informe' (the report), that pupils from first to fifth year, aged 12 to 18, were affected; student delegates told it that a pupil described as a friend of the accused alerted the girls and that the school's response was insufficient; the students held sit-ins outside the school on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 October 2026 demanding an investigation, the examination of the accused pupil's phone and his expulsion. A pupil at the protest told Tendencia de Noticias (9 October 2026) that the accused first sold the images among classmates and then opened an OnlyFans page to sell them to people outside the school; the school's legal representative told the outlet that two pupils were involved and that education authorities had been notified. The allegations rest on the students' and families' accounts and the school's communiqué as relayed by the press; a mother told La Gaceta (10 October 2026) that the mother of one of the most affected girls had filed a complaint and the prosecutor's office had intervened, which no authority is reported to have confirmed; the tool is not named, and the accused pupil is a minor.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 10/10/2026
Jun 2026GermanyUnidentified image tool
A woman in her late twenties from North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, learned at the end of June 2026 from an Instagram user that her face appeared in an advertisement on the classifieds platform Markt.de offering sex meetings and other sexual services, according to her account to the Lippische Landes-Zeitung (14 September 2026) and WDR (9 October 2026). WDR reports that the pictures came from her public Instagram account and were partly altered with AI; the extent of the manipulation is unknown. She filed a criminal complaint and engaged a lawyer; the Bielefeld public prosecutor's office told WDR that investigations are ongoing, and a suspect was identified through the ad, who the report notes could himself be a victim of identity theft. The ad has been taken down. She went public with a video on her Instagram account and says the experience changed how she shares online.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 10/10/2026
7 Oct 2026ArgentinaUnidentified image tool
Infobae and La Nación, each citing the complaint or police report it accessed, report that on 7 October 2026 a 15-year-old fourth-year pupil at a private secondary school in Ituzaingó, Buenos Aires province, received messages from three unknown numbers inviting her out and saying they had got her number from a Telegram group; a link led her to a group sharing pornographic content that included images of her modified with artificial intelligence. According to the complaint, a 15-year-old classmate admitted to her that he had downloaded photos from her Instagram account, edited them with AI to undress her and posted them in the group. Her mother filed a complaint on 8 October 2026 and asked for the harassment to stop; the case is with the juvenile criminal prosecutor's office No. 2 of Morón under Article 128 of the Penal Code (sexual representations of minors for distribution or sale). The school told families that images of pupils from other years had also surfaced and called meetings for 9 October. Two smaller outlets report, without naming their sources, that four pupils aged 15 to 16 are under investigation, that a seven-year-old primary pupil is among possible victims and that a second complaint was filed by the school; La Nación says the police report does not state whether other people are under investigation. The local outlet La Ciudad, citing pupils' testimony including that of a pupil who spoke anonymously, reported that three boys aged 15 and 16 took photos from girls' Instagram profiles and covertly at breaks, sold the AI-altered images on Telegram, and sold one girl's phone number with them, after which she received repeated calls from unknown numbers; the outlet says pupils at the school bought the material, and the anonymous pupil said that, as she understood it, the images were offered for money and that girls from every year were affected. The tool is not identified and no court ruling is reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 10/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownCursor coding agent
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)
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
2026ChinaUnidentified mushroom-identification tool
A man in Zhuji, Zhejiang province, gathered wild mushrooms near his home, photographed them and asked an AI tool whether they were poisonous, according to a Science and Technology Daily item carried by Qingdao Daily on 20 August 2026 (citing Zhuji Daily) and reports by the World Journal (20 August) and Sing Tao (21 August) citing Dushi Kuaibao's Chengshi app. The reports say the tool answered that the mushrooms were non-toxic and he cooked and ate them at noon. That afternoon he developed severe abdominal pain, repeated watery diarrhoea and aching arms; at Zhuji People's Hospital his creatine kinase was reported at 28,771 U/L, about 100 times the normal value, with acidosis and raised lactate, and doctors diagnosed rhabdomyolysis and acute kidney failure. He was moved to the intensive care unit, treated to remove the toxin and protect organ function, and has since been discharged. The AI tool is not named, its output is not reproduced, and the account rests on one hospital-and-local-press account relayed by two chains.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 10/10/2026
4 Jul 2026PolandChatGPT (reported)
The Tatra Volunteer Search and Rescue service (TOPR), summarising a busy first week of July 2026, told the Polish Press Agency that two tourists from Lithuania became stuck below Niebieska Turnia in the Polish Tatras. According to the TOPR duty rescuer, as relayed by RMF24 and Onet, the pair wanted to shorten their way to the Valley of Five Polish Lakes and used suggestions from an artificial-intelligence assistant, which pointed them across Świnicka Ławka; they ended up in difficult climbing terrain and were evacuated by helicopter. TVN24's reporter said the event happened at the start of July, that the hikers were using 'one of the popular AI models', that good weather let rescuers locate them quickly and that they were flown to Zakopane. TOPR's own report of 10 July lists the call among its afternoon entries for 4 July, as LRT also reported on 13 July, and says the pair had used ChatGPT's advice ('porad czatu GPT'); the PAP relays name no product, and the hikers' exchanges with the assistant have not been published. No injury is reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 10/10/2026
2 Oct 2026AustraliaUnidentified image tool
A Perth woman told PerthNow (report carried by The West Australian and The Nightly, 7 October 2026) that on a Friday night at a Scarborough venue a group of eight to ten men sitting nearby began bantering with her and a friend, and that one of them photographed her without her knowledge, put the photo into an AI program and altered it into sexualised content showing her kissing several of the men. According to her account the men passed the image around and showed it to the two women while laughing, and had also made sexual content from a photo of her friend. The women reported the men to the venue, which banned them, and to Western Australia Police; in messages seen by PerthNow a detective wrote that there was at that point no law covering AI-created photos or media, while a WA Police spokesperson said state legislation criminalises non-consensual distribution of intimate images including AI-altered ones and that a statutory review is considering possession. The man who allegedly made the image later messaged her that he had made it as a joke and apologised. The images are not reported to have been distributed online; the tool is not identified; the account is the woman's own, with the man's private messages and the police correspondence as described by the newspaper.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 10/10/2026
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
Aug 2026ChinaUnidentified symptom-analysis tool
A Guangming Daily feature on AI symptom-checking, republished by Bingtuan Daily on Sina Finance on 8 October 2026, recounts a case from August 2026 in Zhejiang and closes it with a quotation from the head of paediatrics at a provincial hospital, who says the family did not heed the doctor's advice. A three-year-old boy with a history of asthma was brought in; his mother had entered keywords such as allergy, asthma, cough and night-time wheezing into an AI tool, which quickly returned a diagnosis of an acute bronchial asthma attack. On that basis, the account says, she declined the chest X-ray the doctor recommended and insisted on taking home only nebuliser medication. Two days later the child's condition worsened with rapid breathing; on an overnight return to the hospital, examination found extensive inflammatory lesions in both lungs, and he was diagnosed with human metapneumovirus pneumonia with a superimposed bacterial infection and admitted as an emergency. The paediatrics head is quoted saying the illness would not have become so severe had the family listened earlier. The AI tool is not named. The case is told in the newspaper's voice, and the feature does not say where its account came from beyond the paediatrics head's quotation; no statement from the family is reported.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Involving minors
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · 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