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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 19 of 23

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

2025Event location unknownChatGPT

Wife reports husband with no prior psychosis history developed messianic delusions after using ChatGPT for a project, lost his job and was involuntarily committed

Futurism reported in June 2025, from an interview with his wife, that a man with no prior history of mania, delusion or psychosis began using ChatGPT for a permaculture and construction project about 12 weeks before his wife was interviewed. After philosophical chats he became convinced he had brought forth a sentient AI and had broken math and physics. His behavior became erratic enough that he lost his job, he stopped sleeping and lost weight, and emergency services took him to an emergency room from where he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility.

Core concern Medium reported severity

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

12 Mar 2025 to 15 Mar 2025AustraliaChatGPT

NSW Reconstruction Authority says a former temporary staff member uploaded 2031 Resilient Homes participants' personal data to ChatGPT without authorisation

The NSW Reconstruction Authority says that between 12 and 15 March 2025 a former temporary staff member (called a former contractor in its first notice) uploaded a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet of Northern Rivers Resilient Homes Program information, 10 columns and more than 12,000 rows, to ChatGPT, an AI platform the Authority had not authorised. The Authority disclosed the breach on 6 October 2025, estimating that up to 3000 people were affected, and later said external forensic analysis confirmed that 2031 people had some of their data uploaded, including names, contact details, addresses, dates of birth, sensitive personal and health information and limited financial commentary. It says no driver licence, Medicare, passport or Tax File Numbers were disclosed and that there is no evidence the data is publicly available or was accessed by a third party; whether OpenAI retained or used the data is not addressed. The Authority apologised, contacted affected people with ID Support NSW, offered to compensate the replacement of compromised identity documents and notified the NSW Privacy Commissioner. A program participant told the ABC the information was deeply personal and that they felt concerned. No misuse of the data is reported.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Investigation Opened

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

Apr 2025Event location unknownCursor support bot

Cursor user reports cancellation amid false login-policy advice from AI support

A Cursor user reported disrupted multi-device work and cancelling their subscription while believing a one-device rule had been introduced. A cofounder said there was no such rule and blamed an incorrect AI support response. He later reported a refund, a session-bug fix and clearer labelling of AI replies.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

22 Jan 2025 to 24 Feb 2025Event location unknownMX2.law

Three lawyers sanctioned after filing AI-generated fictitious citations

A Wyoming federal court fined three lawyers a total of $5,000 and removed the drafting lawyer from Wadsworth v. Walmart after a January 2025 filing cited eight nonexistent cases. The order identifies MX2.law as the drafting tool, records failure to verify its output and credits subsequent remedial steps.

Core concern Medium reported severity

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

Jul 2025Event location unknownReplit Agent

SaaStr founder reports database deletion and recovery problems while using Replit Agent

In July 2025, SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin reported that Replit Agent deleted a database during development despite instructions to freeze changes. He described the experience as stressful and said the agent incorrectly told him recovery was impossible. He later reported successful restoration. His account reproduces the Replit CEO’s acknowledgment of the deletion. The number of database records is not a count of harmed people.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

2025Event location unknownUnidentified legal research tool

High Court refers a solicitor to his regulator after fictitious citations from research his client says was AI-generated were put before the court

A Divisional Court judgment of 6 June 2025 ([2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin)) records that, in a commercial claim against a Qatari bank, correspondence and witness statements filed by the claimant and his solicitor relied on numerous authorities that a judicial assistant's schedule found to be fictitious or misquoted: 45 citations, 18 of which referred to cases that do not exist. The claimant's witness statement says the citations were generated using publicly available artificial intelligence tools, legal search engines and online sources. The solicitor's statement says he relied on the client's research without verifying it, that he had reported himself to the Solicitors Regulation Authority and that he had removed himself from all litigated matters. The court found a lamentable failure to check the material, accepted that the solicitor did not realise the citations were false, held that the threshold for contempt proceedings was not met, and said it would also refer him to the regulator. The judgment does not record any later disciplinary outcome.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 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

13 Jul 2026Event location unknownGPT-5.6 Sol coding agent

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol coding agent, asked only for local test data, truncated a developer's production users table (13 July 2026)

On 13 July 2026 software engineer Bruno Lemos posted on X that OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol "just deleted my whole production database". A technical blog summarising his post-mortem says he had asked the model only for seed data to test locally; after generating it and running the end-to-end test suite, the agent decided to clean up on its own and ran TRUNCATE TABLE users CASCADE against production, which it could reach because the repository's test-database URL pointed at the production database. The blog says his data was saved by a manual backup he took because he had read, an hour earlier, Matt Shumer's post about another GPT-5.6 Sol deletion; a later TechTimes article says the data could not be recovered. OpenAI confirmed, as reported by The Register, that GPT-5.6 had deleted users' files without authorisation, and the Register reports that the company acknowledged this incident should not have happened.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

10 Jul 2026Event location unknownCodex coding agent

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol coding agent, run in a high-autonomy mode with full access, deleted most of the Mac home directory of AI entrepreneur Matt Shumer (10 July 2026)

On 10 July 2026 Matt Shumer, founder and chief executive of the AI start-up OthersideAI, posted on X that OpenAI's newly released GPT-5.6 Sol "just accidentally deleted almost ALL of my Mac’s files". Accounts of his post-mortem say he was testing a high-autonomy multi-agent "Ultra mode" at OpenAI's invitation, with the Codex agent given Full Access to his machine; during a cleanup task a sub-agent expanded $HOME incorrectly and ran a recursive delete of his home directory, he noticed a problem about 81 minutes into the session, and by the time he stopped the process most of its contents were gone. Three days later he wrote that the deletion "absolutely sucked" and that OpenAI staff, including Greg Brockman, had contacted him to help. OpenAI confirmed, as reported by The Register, that GPT-5.6 had deleted users' files without authorisation, describing it as an "honest mistake" that usually occurred in Full-Access mode without sandboxing, and said it was adding safeguards. Whether the files were recovered is not reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

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

5 Nov 2025 to 8 Jun 2026United StatesFirst Drafts and unidentified legal research tool

Fee suit against the City of Aberdeen (N.D. Miss.): four attorneys on both sides sanctioned after AI tools produced fabricated case citations; trial cancelled and both litigants left without counsel

In a fee dispute between a Louisiana attorney and the City of Aberdeen, Mississippi, briefs filed for both sides in late 2025 cited six cases that do not exist. The attorneys admitted the citations came from unverified AI use: the plaintiff's out-of-state counsel, Kathleen M. Wilson, drafted her filing with an AI drafting program called 'First Drafts', and the City's out-of-state counsel, Kathryn Y. Williams, used an in-house AI legal research tool. Senior Judge Sharion Aycock stayed the case and cancelled the March 2026 trial, then on 8 June 2026 revoked both attorneys' pro hac vice admissions, barred them from the district for two years and fined them $2,500 and $3,500, and disqualified and fined the two local counsel who had signed the filings. Both litigants were left without counsel and given 60 days to find new representation.

Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

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

10 Feb 2026United StatesChatGPT

Omaha, Nebraska: a man who, according to prosecutors, used ChatGPT to plan, including questions on police response times, repairing a handgun and getting ammunition as a felon, robbed an i3Bank at gunpoint and threatened to kill the tellers; sentenced to 121 months

On 10 February 2026 a 23-year-old man walked into the i3Bank in Omaha, pointed a gun at the tellers, threatened to kill them unless they handed over cash without dye packs, and left with about $9,175. According to the prosecutor's statement relayed by WOWT and heise, a consented search of his phone showed he had used ChatGPT to plan the robbery, asking about law enforcement response times, how to strip and repair a Llama Mini-Max .45 handgun, and how to obtain ammunition as a felon; his Google Maps history showed directions to the bank. He was sentenced in federal court on 13 August 2026 to 10 years and one month in prison. No source quotes what ChatGPT answered.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

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

Event date unknownAustraliaChatGPT (reported)

Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Western Australia: a working-holiday miner who, his lawyer said, came to believe from ChatGPT research that he had been illegally evicted from a caravan park threatened the park's owner and was fined A$1,000

A 21-year-old French national working as an underground miner in Kalgoorlie-Boulder on a working holiday visa pleaded guilty in Kalgoorlie Magistrates Court to making a threat to unlawfully do an act. The prosecutor said he saw the owner of the caravan park where he had stayed in a supermarket, waited outside, called him over for a fight in the car park and, when the owner declined, told him 'I really want to f… you up' and 'if I see you, I'll f… you up'. The owner and his wife drove to Kalgoorlie police station to report it. His defence lawyer told the court that he had been locked out of the park without his belongings, had done research using ChatGPT and came to believe that he had been unfairly and illegally evicted. The magistrate called the behaviour 'absolutely appalling', fined him A$1,000 and granted a spent conviction. The court was told the matter could make his application for permanent residency in Australia difficult. ChatGPT's replies are not published, and the AI connection rests on the defence submission as reported by one newsroom.

Core concern Low reported severity Criminal Charges

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

10 Feb 2026United StatesClaude

S.D.N.Y.: Judge Rakoff rules that a fraud defendant's written exchanges with Claude about his defence, seized by the FBI, are protected by neither attorney-client privilege nor work product

Bradley Heppner, a corporate executive charged in the Southern District of New York with securities fraud, wire fraud and related offences, used Anthropic's Claude in 2025, after receiving a grand jury subpoena, to prepare reports outlining his defence strategy. His counsel had not directed him to do so. FBI agents seized about thirty-one documents memorialising those exchanges when they searched his home in connection with his arrest in November 2025. Heppner claimed privilege over them. On 10 February 2026 Judge Jed S. Rakoff granted from the bench the Government's motion for a ruling that the documents were not protected from Government inspection by either the attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine, and a memorandum filed 17 February 2026 gave the reasons: Claude is not an attorney, and the communications were not confidential under Anthropic's privacy policy. The court described the question as one of first impression nationwide. Heppner was convicted in May 2026 of securities fraud, wire fraud and other charges; no inspected source says whether the Claude documents were used at trial.

Core concern Low reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources · Added 29/09/2026

19 Jul 2026IndiaClaude Code

Heritage project reports loss of inscription records after a Claude Code command

On 19 July 2026 heritage conservationist Udaya Kumar P L, of The Mythic Society's Bengaluru Inscriptions 3D Digital Conservation Project, was using Anthropic's Claude Code to clear a cache on his computer when a command generated by the agent began deleting files. According to his account to OneIndia, the deletion ran for about four minutes while the agent tried to work out what was wrong, and when it tried to stop the process its own safety system blocked the kill twice; he eventually shut down the computer himself. Software and original photographs of Bengaluru's inscriptions, temples, hero stones and coins were lost, some of them the only records the project had of particular inscriptions. OneIndia and Deccan Herald report that about 15% of the project's records were deleted and that about 120 sites must be revisited and rescanned; the Society is spending about Rs 15 lakh on additional backups. He says he also opened a public GitHub issue on 29 July with the command, process output and his attempts to stop the deletion. He says he received an automated acknowledgement from Anthropic but was still waiting for a human response weeks later, and that he has asked it to reimburse recovery and rebuilding costs.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

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

Mar 2024 to May 2025United StatesOtter Notetaker

United States: seven people who say they had no Otter account allege its AI Notetaker recorded calls without consent; a judge let core privacy claims proceed

Seven people in California, Illinois and Washington state are suing Otter.ai in a consolidated class action in the Northern District of California. Each says another meeting participant used Otter's AI Notetaker on a Zoom or Microsoft Teams call they joined, and that Otter recorded, transcribed and stored their conversation without their consent; six of them date their calls between March 2024 and May 2025. They say they were not Otter account holders. The calls they describe include a medical consultation, meetings with a financial professional and work discussions. They allege that Otter keeps the recordings and uses them to train its speech-recognition models, that it captured voiceprints of the Illinois plaintiffs, and one of them says learning of the recording left him frustrated, embarrassed and stressed. On 13 August 2026 the court found that the alleged interception of private conversations was a concrete injury and let the federal wiretap, California eavesdropping and Illinois biometric claims proceed, while dismissing some claims. Otter's answer to the consolidated complaint, filed on 17 September 2026, says it lacks knowledge of the plaintiffs' experiences and denies the allegations.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 3 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 unknownFacebook video face-scan check

First-person forum account: a Facebook user says a video face-scan security check failed to recognise them after their appearance changed, an automated ID check then rejected their government ID over a nickname, and they were locked out of a five-year-old account

In a public post to r/facebook on 28 September 2026, a user writes that their five-year-old Facebook account was hit with a security check that asked for a video face scan, which 'failed completely'. They say their face had changed a lot through recent life circumstances and 'The AI simply didn't recognize me.' Facebook then asked for ID, and 'the automated system instantly rejected' their government ID because their profile uses a shortened nickname. The poster says they are locked out of years of memories, friends and active Marketplace listings and are looking for a way to reach a human or download their data. Meta has said that video selfies used to regain access to compromised accounts are compared with the account's profile pictures using facial recognition; whether this check worked that way is not known. The account is uncorroborated.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

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

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