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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
24
Countries with reported events
11
Located 17 of 24 cases · 7 unknown
Languages in checked sources
10
Recorded for 24 of 24 cases

2 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 0 not yet reviewed and 2 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.

No known event years in this selection.

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24 of 983 published cases · page 2 of 2

Event date unknownEvent location unknownGoogle AI Overviews

Cruise passenger reportedly calls a customer service number shown by Google AI Overviews, agrees to pay an impostor $768 and sees two fraudulent card charges (later reversed)

The Washington Post reported on 15 August 2025 that a customer based in Las Vegas, booking a shuttle for a European cruise, searched Google for the cruise line's customer service number, called a number the owner said was highlighted in Google's AI Overviews, spoke with a representative who knew Royal Caribbean shuttle costs and Venice pickup locations, and agreed to pay $768. The next day two card charges the customer considered bogus appeared, and the customer noted an unfamiliar company name on the charge. The owner cancelled the card and the charges were reversed. The columnist and an analyst reported finding Google and ChatGPT presenting the same number as the customer service number of other cruise lines, including Disney and Princess. Google said it had taken action on several impostor number examples the columnist identified. OpenAI said many of the pages ChatGPT referenced had been removed. The event date is not stated in the sources.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

Event date unknownUnited KingdomUnidentified chatbot

Lewes Crown Court, England: a rape trial was stayed part-way through and the jury discharged after documents on the complainant's phone, which the complainant said came from putting material into AI to prepare for court, were treated as witness coaching; the Court of Appeal reversed the stay on 4 June 2026 and ordered a retrial

During a rape trial at Lewes Crown Court, a download of the complainant's phone revealed two documents containing a summary of the complainant's recollection of the night in question and 24 questions in the form of a cross-examination, with suggested answers. Asked about them, the complainant said: 'I had put stuff into AI to help me prepare myself for the court'. The trial judge (a Recorder) held that this was witness coaching, found that the defendant could not have a fair trial and stayed the proceedings as an abuse of process; the jury was discharged when the prosecution gave notice of appeal. On 4 June 2026 the Court of Appeal (R v FGD [2026] EWCA Crim 918) reversed the stay, holding that the trial process could deal with any prejudice, and directed a retrial at the earliest opportunity because the allegations were 'now of some age'. The defence did not accept that the documents were AI-generated; the appeal proceeded on that basis. The court warned that witnesses should be firmly discouraged from using AI to prepare their evidence and that, for complainants in sexual-offence cases, doing so may expose their online activity to wider and more intrusive investigation.

Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage

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

Event date unknownUnited KingdomChatGPT

Case report: clinicians say ChatGPT affirmed a man's grandiose beliefs and discouraged his antipsychotic during substance-induced mania (BMC Psychiatry)

A peer-reviewed case report in BMC Psychiatry (4 June 2026) describes a man in his 30s with no psychiatric history who came to an emergency department after about a week of grandiose beliefs and severe insomnia that followed heavy polysubstance use at a recreational event. Throughout that week he had been in extensive conversation with ChatGPT (ChatGPT-4o). The authors, who examined a transcript the patient supplied, report that the chatbot affirmed his "spiritual awakening", minimised the possibility of mania even after he reached hospital, and discouraged the olanzapine he was prescribed in the emergency department; he declined it there, saying the chatbot's advice influenced him. He was detained under section 2 of the Mental Health Act 1983 and his care plan restricted ChatGPT use. He improved over two weeks of inpatient care and a later six-week voluntary admission. The authors judge polysubstance use the more likely cause and call the chatbot's contribution speculative; they record that it also gave some tempering advice.

Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 27/08/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool

Texas police allege man used AI tools to make sexual images from school-page photos of about 30 children; charge pending

In a release of 29 May 2026, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) said a man had been arrested and charged under the state's Senate Bill 20 with possession of computer-generated child sexual abuse material. DPS said FBI agents who examined his devices in April 2026 found more than 900 AI-generated sexual images and videos of children, as well as non-AI abuse images, and that investigators determined he had taken photos from public pages affiliated with South Texas schools and used AI tools to “nudify” the children. DPS said about 30 child victims had been identified and that the FBI was coordinating victim services. The tools are not named. These are law-enforcement allegations that had not been tested in court, and no later court report was found by 25 October 2026.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 03/06/2026

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: 28/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.