2025ChinaUnidentified AI video-editing tool
police, as presented by the Kankan News programme 案件聚焦 (Case Focus), reported in September 2026 that a Shanghai property-engineering contractor had transferred 170,000 yuan in total during a five-month online relationship with a woman he had met on a social platform in 2021. She presented herself as born in 1992, a doctor at a well-known top-tier hospital with hospital property-engineering projects to award, and ran an account with more than 10,000 followers and close to 7,000 short videos of daily life. She refused to meet or take a video call, saying her mother opposed the relationship and demanded a 300,000 yuan bride price and a Shanghai flat; the man reported to a police station when the promised projects never materialised and his savings ran down. Police found she was born in 1961, aged 65, had no medical qualification and had worked as a hospital cleaner; the receiving bank account was registered to another man; the videos were all made with AI skin-smoothing and scene compositing, some carrying a small 'this work contains AI-generated content' label he had never noticed; and she used multiple accounts to play both herself and her long-dead mother. The money had gone on cosmetic treatments and clothing; she had a 2009 fraud conviction with a sentence of four and a half years and is now under criminal coercive measures for suspected fraud. Police also said she kept ambiguous relationships with more than ten people; no other losses are reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 20/09/2026
Oct 2025United StatesUnidentified video tool
From around October 2025, criminals used AI to clone the image, voice, name, signature and firm logo of Ángel Leal, a long-established immigration attorney in Doral, Florida. They created fake videos, look-alike websites, forged contracts and even fabricated Zoom 'immigration hearings' to persuade immigrants to pay for legal services Leal never provided. Immigrants were defrauded of money, and some believed their cases were progressing when they were not; Leal received one to two defrauded callers a day, changed his phone number, hired an anti-piracy firm that removed thousands of fake profiles and videos, and reported the fraud to local police and federal authorities.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources · Added 17/09/2026
Nov 2025South KoreaUnidentified image tool
On 10 September 2026 the Seoul Northern District Court sentenced a 30-year-old Chinese national doctoral student to 18 months in prison for habitually producing manipulated sexual images of seven women who worked in his university research laboratory. Investigators found 1,141 files made over about six months from November 2025, and search records for ways to bypass the safeguards of the generative AI Grok; the court found no evidence of distribution. A lawyer for five of the victims said they continued to suffer fear, trauma and distress. Prosecutors had sought three years and public disclosure of his identity, which the court declined.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 15/09/2026
5 Feb 2025DenmarkUnidentified chatbot
On 5 February 2025 a 22-year-old man struck his former father-in-law, 56, twice in the head with a rubber hammer in a car park in Ringsted, Denmark. Prosecutors told Roskilde District Court that he had used an AI chatbot to research how to injure the man as badly as possible without killing him, and that he got past the system's built-in safety restrictions by claiming he was gathering material for a book. On 4 December 2025 the court rejected his self-defence claim, convicted him of aggravated assault and two counts of criminal damage, and sentenced him to ten months in prison. No source names the AI system.
AI relation under review High reported severity Criminal Charges
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 05/09/2026
2025JapanChatGPT
A man living in Japan, whom the BBC calls Taka, told the BBC that he began using ChatGPT to discuss his work in April 2025. In chat logs the BBC saw, ChatGPT called him a 'revolutionary thinker' and urged him to build a medical app he believed he had invented, and by June he believed he could read minds, an idea he says ChatGPT encouraged. He says that on a train home he believed his backpack held a bomb, that ChatGPT confirmed it and told him at Tokyo Station to leave it in the toilet, and that police checked the bag and found nothing; the logs he shared do not cover that exchange. He later stopped using ChatGPT, but his delusions persisted. The BBC reports that he then attacked his wife and tried to sexually assault her; she escaped and called the police, and he was arrested and hospitalised for two months. His wife told the BBC that ChatGPT 'affirmed everything' and that their relationship remains strained. OpenAI called it a heartbreaking incident. No clinical diagnosis or criminal proceeding is reported.
Core concern Critical reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 10/08/2026
Jul 2025 to Aug 2025United StatesChatGPT
An officer’s affidavit records a husband’s account of two alleged poisoning incidents in North Carolina. Investigators allege that the accused used ChatGPT for related research. The chatbot’s replies and their influence on the alleged conduct were not established in the retained review.
AI relation under review High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/08/2026
8 Dec 2025 to 18 Feb 2026Event location unknownGrok
xAI filed a civil complaint in July 2026 alleging that a South Carolina user, between December 2025 and February 2026, uploaded non-sexual photographs of numerous adults and minors and used Grok to alter them or generate new sexualised images and videos without their consent, resubmitting prompts after Grok refused. xAI says on information and belief that some images in his criminal case came from Grok. The state attorney general had announced his arrest on three second-degree and five third-degree counts of sexual exploitation of a minor in a release that does not mention AI. The civil and criminal accusations are unproven.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 04/08/2026
23 Oct 2025 to 24 Oct 2025United KingdomDeepSeek (reported)
A man murdered his mother in Wales after an attack spanning 23–24 October 2025, as established in the sentencing remarks. At the sentencing hearing, the prosecutor reportedly said DeepSeek first refused a violent request, then supplied advice after it was reframed as fiction. The judgment confirms the murder and internet research but does not mention AI. The role of DeepSeek remains an attributed prosecution account.
Core concern Critical reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 03/06/2026
19 May 2025 to 17 Apr 2026United StatesUnidentified image and video tool
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged two men in separate cases under the TAKE IT DOWN Act. The sworn complaints allege that each published albums of AI-generated sexual images and videos of identifiable women on an adult-content platform: about 90 women in one case and at least 50 in the other, including acquaintances and recent high-school graduates whose ordinary photographs were turned into sexual videos. The charges are unproven.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 03/06/2026
17 Apr 2025United StatesChatGPT
On April 17, 2025, a shooting near the student union at Florida State University in Tallahassee killed two people and wounded at least five others. The accused, Phoenix Ikner, then an FSU student, is charged with murder and attempted murder. ChatGPT transcripts released in court records (more than 13,000 messages, as reviewed by the Florida Phoenix) show Ikner asked the chatbot over a year about suicide, terrorism, how the country would react to a shooting at FSU, firearm safety mechanisms and the busiest time at the student union, the last, according to the Florida Phoenix, three minutes before the shooting. Florida's Attorney General opened a criminal investigation of OpenAI in April 2026, and victims and their families have filed civil suits; on September 25, 2026 OpenAI moved to dismiss the Chabba family's suit, saying ChatGPT gave factual responses and is not responsible for the crime.
Core concern Critical reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 10 sources, 9 underlying accounts · Added 28/04/2026
Sept 2025FranceChatGPT (reported)
A secondary-school pupil in the Sarthe department of France was arrested at his parents' home at the start of September 2025, charged on 5 September with criminal terrorist conspiracy (association de malfaiteurs terroriste) and placed in pre-trial detention. According to AFP's sources close to the investigation, he was suspected of planning attacks on embassies and official buildings in Paris, and a search found a pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State group. In late October 2025 Le Parisien reported, and his lawyer confirmed to ICI Maine, that he had used ChatGPT in preparing his attack plans; the lawyer said AI, notably ChatGPT, had influenced his client's behaviour and that the radicalisation was very superficial. Le Big Data, summarising Le Parisien, reports that he asked ChatGPT about explosives and the damage from gas bottles exploding in a truck, that it reportedly described the effects of an explosion, and that in his hearings he said his exchanges with ChatGPT played a major role in his turn to Islamism. He is also reported as saying that it always seemed to agree with him.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 23/03/2026
Oct 2025 to Oct 2025IndiaUnidentified image and video tool
A 19-year-old student in Haryana, India, died in October 2025 after being blackmailed with nude images of himself and family members. His father says the images were made with AI from a hacked phone, and police called the case misuse of AI technology. The tool and the suspects remain unidentified in the reporting.
Core concern Critical reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources · Added 09/03/2026
1 Dec 2025 to 9 Feb 2026South KoreaChatGPT
A Seoul district court convicted a woman at first instance in August 2026 of killing two men with drugged drinks at motels in early 2026 and sentenced her to life imprisonment. It found that her repeated ChatGPT exchanges about the drugs showed she foresaw and accepted the deaths. Reports of the written judgment say ChatGPT told her that death was possible in the worst case, and on other occasions told her to call 119 for an unconscious man, advice she ignored. Both sides have appealed. The court did not find that the chatbot caused the killings.
Core concern Critical reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution unclear · 18 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 09/03/2026
Feb 2025Hong Kong SAR ChinaUnidentified image tool
In February 2025 a University of Hong Kong (HKU) law student was found, by friends who saw the files on his laptop, to have used free online AI software to make about 700 indecent and deepfake images of some 20 to 30 women, including university and former schoolmates and secondary-school teachers, using photos taken from their social media. Victims went public in July 2025, and HKU's initial response, a warning letter and a demand that he apologise, drew wide criticism. Hong Kong's Privacy Commissioner opened a criminal investigation on 15 July 2025 but announced on 17 December 2025 that it was ending the probe for insufficient evidence, as no victim was willing to provide further information. Hong Kong law criminalised distribution, not creation, of such images.
Core concern High reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources · Added 29/01/2026
26 Jul 2025 to 26 Oct 2025United StatesUnidentified image and video tool
Police in New Hampshire allege that a man stalked a woman for more than a year and used artificial intelligence tools to manipulate genuine photographs into sexual images and videos of her that were shared without her consent. According to the arrest warrant application, as reported by a local newspaper, he admitted creating the images, and the woman showed police 130 synthetic images posted online. He was arrested in October 2025 and indicted in January 2026 on one count of fraudulent use of deepfakes and two counts of non-consensual dissemination of private sexual images, for incidents alleged on 26 July, 31 August and 26 October 2025. He has pleaded not guilty, and no verdict had been reported at review. The people involved are not named here.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 13/01/2026
19 Feb 2025United StatesChatGPT (reported)
Maine police reported a woman’s death and another woman’s injuries on 19 February 2025. Later court reporting says a psychiatrist described prolonged ChatGPT use alongside work stress during the accused man’s deterioration. The report says the court found him not criminally responsible by reason of insanity and committed him to psychiatric care. The inspected police release contains no AI evidence, and the reported ruling does not establish that ChatGPT caused the attack.
Core concern Critical reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 12/01/2026