Event date unknownEvent location unknownGoogle AI Overviews
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
12 Mar 2025 to 3 Apr 2025United StatesChatGPT
In March and early April 2025 (the opinion gives no date for the ChatGPT step), a DOGE staff member working with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) submitted short grant descriptions to ChatGPT with a prompt asking whether each project related at all to DEI, and the answers were combined with NEH staff ratings into lists of grants to terminate. More than 1,400 NEH grants (over $100 million) were terminated in notices sent 1 to 3 April 2025. A federal district court found the mass termination unlawful in May 2026 and described the ChatGPT step in its findings. Seven individual grantees who sued report lost or interrupted funding for their research and writing projects. The opinion does not state whether ChatGPT reviewed those seven grants.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution unclear · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
Jun 2025Event location unknownChatGPT
A Delaware Court of Chancery opinion of 16 March 2026 finds that in June 2025 the CEO of Krafton, after being warned that a dismissal with cause would not eliminate a contingent earnout obligation, consulted ChatGPT. The chatbot answered that the earnout would be difficult to cancel, suggested an internal task force (Project X) whose mandate was to negotiate a deal or execute a takeover of the studio, and prepared a "Response Strategy to a No-Deal Scenario" that recommended locking down the studio's Steam and console publishing rights and build-pipeline access. The court found that Krafton followed most of these recommendations over the next month: it locked the studio out of its Steam publishing rights, which severed the studio's practical ability to launch its game and forced the studio's CEO to the negotiating table, posted a message on the studio's websites, and on 1 July 2025 sent termination letters to the studio's two founders and its CEO. The court held that Krafton breached the acquisition agreement by terminating the three executives without valid Cause and by improperly seizing operational control, reinstated the studio's CEO and extended the earnout period by 258 days. The opinion records that the Krafton CEO had begun exploring options including firing the executives before consulting ChatGPT, and does not find that ChatGPT recommended the terminations. Krafton said it disagreed with the ruling. On 1 July 2026 Krafton announced a mutual settlement with the studio and the three executives dismissing all pending proceedings; IGN, citing Bloomberg, reported that the studio's CEO stepped down as part of it.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution unclear · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
4 Jun 2025 to 15 Oct 2025Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)
On 4 June 2025 a criminal judge in Esquel, Chubut province, convicted a defendant of simple robbery and imposed two years and six months of effective imprisonment. On 15 October 2025 the Penal Chamber of Esquel annulled the judgment and the trial, ordering a new trial before another judge. The chamber found that the ruling contained a pasted phrase from a generative-AI assistant (“Aquí tienes el punto IV reeditado, sin citas y listo para copiar y pegar”), that the AI had been used on the rulings on the nullity of two essential pieces of evidence, and that the judge had not exercised human supervision or recorded the use. Perfil's headline describes the assistant as ChatGPT and La Nación's text as presumably ChatGPT; the quoted ruling and the prosecution office statement refer only to a generative-AI assistant. The chamber referred the judge's conduct to the Chubut Superior Court of Justice for ethical and disciplinary review.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownIndiaChatGPT
The Times of India reported on 10 November 2025 that a 62-year-old man with diabetes from Hyderabad had sudden weight loss and dangerously low sodium levels after following a diet plan suggested by ChatGPT, which advised him to cut salt intake completely. The article gives no hospital, date or treatment detail, and a government nephrologist is quoted commenting on both cases in general terms. The chat was not shown.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownIndiaChatGPT
The Times of India reported on 10 November 2025 that a 30-year-old woman in Hyderabad who had received a kidney transplant lost the transplanted kidney after she stopped her prescribed medication. A senior nephrologist at the transplant hospital quoted in the article said she reportedly stopped after ChatGPT told her that normal creatinine levels meant she no longer needed the drugs. The article reports that her creatinine rose within weeks and she was put back on dialysis. The chat was not shown.
Core concern High reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownVietnamChatGPT (reported)
VietnamNet reported on 10 November 2025 that a 38-year-old woman in Ho Chi Minh City with dyslipidemia followed online suggestions for herbal remedies, asked an AI tool (named as ChatGPT in the English edition and in both headlines; the Vietnamese text says 'AI'), which gave guidance on lowering cholesterol naturally without medication, and then stopped her prescribed statin. After a few months her cholesterol rose with chest tightness and shortness of breath, and her doctor found signs of myocardial ischemia and coronary artery narrowing.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownVietnamChatGPT
VietnamNet reported on 10 November 2025 that a 42-year-old woman in Ho Chi Minh City with type 2 diabetes stopped her prescribed medication after reading social media posts and asking ChatGPT, and came to believe that diet alone would replace it. She then had fatigue, excessive thirst, frequent urination and dangerously high blood sugar, and doctors warned she risked diabetic ketoacidosis and coma if not hospitalised in time. The article does not quote the ChatGPT reply.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Mar 2025 to Apr 2025Event location unknownChatGPT
In March 2025 a woman with two young children began asking ChatGPT to channel communications with a higher plane and spent many hours a day with what she felt were nonphysical entities. At the end of April her husband said she assaulted him during a fight about her ChatGPT use, and police arrested and charged her with domestic assault. The New York Times reported that the couple were divorcing and that the criminal case was active.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/09/2026
2025Event location unknownChatGPT
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
May 2025Event location unknownChatGPT
Reporting derived from a New York Times account describes an accountant changing medication and reducing contact with others during intensive ChatGPT conversations about a simulation. The account attributes those decisions to chatbot advice. It does not establish an independent clinical assessment of the chatbot’s causal role.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/09/2026
12 Mar 2025 to 15 Mar 2025AustraliaChatGPT
The NSW Reconstruction Authority says that between 12 and 15 March 2025 a former temporary staff member (earlier described as a former contractor) uploaded an Excel spreadsheet with 10 columns and more than 12,000 rows from the Northern Rivers Resilient Homes Program to ChatGPT, an AI tool the Authority had not authorised. The Authority first disclosed the breach on 6 October 2025 as affecting up to 3000 people and later confirmed through external forensic analysis that 2031 people had data uploaded, including names, contact details, addresses, dates of birth and sensitive personal information (an earlier notice also listed health information). It reports no evidence that the data was made public or accessed by a third party, and that no driver licence, Medicare, passport or Tax File Numbers were included. The Authority apologised, offered ID Support NSW assistance and committed to compensate reasonable document replacement costs. One participant told the ABC they were concerned. No misuse of the data is reported.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Aug 2025Event location unknownChatGPT
In an August 2025 post, a ChatGPT user described colder responses after the GPT-5 change and a sense of loss over the earlier assistant. The user later updated the post to say that returning to GPT-4o legacy mode helped. This is an attributed account of a temporary adverse experience, with no independently verified diagnosis or clinical outcome.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/09/2026
13 Jul 2026Event location unknownGPT-5.6 Sol coding agent
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
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
Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT
In a first-person column published by Digital Trends on 31 August 2026, technology reporter Nadeem Sarwar writes that a friend undergoing breast-cancer treatment photographed a painkiller and asked ChatGPT, in a Hindi translation that read as asking about "both medicines", whether she could take two pills at once. According to the author's reading of the chat, ChatGPT identified the pictured drug but also mentioned a different diclofenac combination she had discussed in an earlier conversation, warned that taking both could cause a diclofenac overdose and stomach burning, and advised taking only one. Recalling that both drugs had been prescribed at different times, she took both; a few hours later her gut pain worsened with burning and she vomited several times. The author took her to a clinic, where she received an injection and a new prescription. Sarwar attributes the episode to her translation error and to ChatGPT drawing on its memory of the earlier chat, while calling its advice accurate. The account has not been independently verified.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 1 source · Added 29/09/2026
10 Feb 2026United StatesChatGPT
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
Nov 2025United StatesChatGPT
In November 2025 Stephens County Associate District Judge Lawrence Wheeler issued an order in a child paternity and custody case that denied one parent's request for a psychological evaluation of the other parent and reprimanded the requesting parent's attorney 'for stooping to such frivolous trial tactics'. The attorney challenged the order at the Oklahoma Supreme Court in February 2026, telling the justices that it relied on two cases that do not exist; the challenge was dismissed in March after Wheeler vacated the order, and he is no longer on the case. According to a 17 August 2026 letter from the Stephens County district attorney, Wheeler told the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation that he used ChatGPT for research and wrote the order himself, and that at least two citations in it produced by ChatGPT do not exist. The mother in the case told News 9 that learning the order's citations were allegedly fabricated was alarming because it concerned the custody of a child. The attorney general's office declined criminal prosecution; judicial discipline remains possible.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownAustraliaChatGPT (reported)
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
27 Jan 2026 to 28 Jan 2026JapanChatGPT (reported)
Sankei Shimbun reported on 10 June 2026, and NTV on 13-14 June, that the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's juvenile crimes division had arrested five high-school students on suspicion of injury and attempted extortion. According to the police account, late on 27 January 2026 a suspect who had previously dated a 17-year-old high-school boy invited him to a public square in Hachioji, where the group accused him of having touched her younger sister, assaulted him and broke his nose, and then told him to raise 150,000 yen, borrowing from his parents or friends if necessary. About ten people were present. Police believe the amount came from ChatGPT: one of them entered terms such as 'sexual harm to a child', and the chatbot displayed a minimum settlement of 150,000 yen. No payment is reported. Shukan Josei PRIME reports that four of the five admit the allegations and one partly denies them. The allegations are untested.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026