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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
89
Countries with reported events
18
Located 60 of 89 cases · 29 unknown
Languages in checked sources
13
Recorded for 89 of 89 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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89 of 1099 published cases · page 2 of 5

2025RussiaAntiplagiat AI-text detector

Russia: university expelled a student after its Antiplagiat AI-content check flagged her thesis; Kazan courts ordered reinstatement and damages

RAPSI and BIZNES Online reported on 8 and 10 June 2026 that the Supreme Court of Tatarstan upheld a ruling that a private Moscow university unlawfully expelled a distance-learning student in 2025 over suspected use of AI in her graduation thesis. According to the university's representatives in court as reported, the Antiplagiat.Vuz system first showed about 41% (41.91%) AI-generated text, her supervisor then said the word order had been deliberately disturbed in more than 70% of the text, and a third check showed 11.92%. BIZNES Online also reports, from the court documents, that a university representative told the court the supervisor does not operate the checking system and had not in fact analysed the text for neural-network generation, and could not explain how the system distinguishes borrowed text from AI generation. The university refused the revised work as late (uploaded on Monday 9 June 2025 against a deadline of 8 June) and expelled her; the department's protocol cited a breach of good-faith work in the Antiplagiat.Vuz system. She denied using AI. In January 2026 the Vakhitovsky District Court of Kazan held the expulsion unlawful, ordered her reinstatement for a check of her thesis and, if it met the originality threshold, admission to the defence, and awarded 40,000 roubles in moral damages and a 20,000-rouble fine. The Supreme Court of Tatarstan dismissed the university's appeal: it held that the probabilistic report had not been checked by a competent expert and could not be the sole proof of bad faith, noted that the same text was classified as AI-generated in one report and not in another, and found no evidence that any flagged fragments resulted from her deliberate acts rather than her sources or an incorrect algorithm. The courts also held the deadline had been miscounted.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 25/10/2026

2021IndiaSamagra Vedika

Al Jazeera investigation says Telangana's Samagra Vedika system wrongly matched poor families to car owners, and officials denied them food subsidy cards

An Al Jazeera investigation published on 24 January 2024, produced with The Reporters' Collective and the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network, reports that Samagra Vedika, a system the Telangana government uses to consolidate residents' data and check welfare eligibility, wrongly tagged poor families in Hyderabad as owning cars, and that officials relied on those tags to deny them food security cards (subsidised rice). Al Jazeera says the system uses machine learning and entity resolution to match people across databases, and that since 2016 officials have been mandated to check whether the system approved an applicant before deciding. In one case it reports that the system mistook a widow's late husband, a rickshaw puller, for a car owner with a similar name; her renewal application was rejected in 2021 for possessing a four-wheeler. After she traced the vehicle's real owner, officials agreed there had been an algorithmic error but said her family income exceeded the limit, which Al Jazeera says was not the case; she had been without the subsidised rations for more than seven years. A second family, whose husband cannot drive, was rejected in 2021 for possessing a four-wheeler; in November 2023 the High Court of Telangana said the petitioner is eligible whenever new cards are issued. The government says the technology is highly precise and that wrong vehicle or house tags occur in under five per cent of cases and have mostly been corrected.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 24/10/2026

Event date unknownAustraliaUnidentified AI checkout camera monitoring system

Australian supermarket cashier got final written warning after AI checkout camera system flagged scanning errors, union submission says

The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association (SDA), an Australian union representing retail, warehouse and fast-food workers, told the federal parliament's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in its written submission that a supermarket employee with more than 30 years' service had recently received a final written warning for scanning inaccuracy generated by an AI checkout monitoring system. According to the union, the system uses overhead cameras to compare items moved through the checkout with items scanned and automatically flags possible mismatches, which set off escalation to head office and pressure on store managers to act. The SDA says her error rate was about 0.18 per cent, roughly one error in 533 items scanned, and that she was never told what standard the system applied. The Sydney Morning Herald (10 October 2026) and Guardian Australia (20 October 2026) reported the case; the Herald says the union has challenged the warning. The account is the union's; the supermarket is not named, and its response and the result of the challenge are not reported.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 24/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot

Panasonic group company says a project member uploaded HR data on about 334,000 employees, former staff and relatives to a banned generative AI service

Panasonic Operational Excellence, a Panasonic Holdings subsidiary, announced on 23 October 2026 that a member of an in-house project introducing a personnel information system had uploaded part of that system's data, as registered in April 2026, to an external generative AI service whose use the company prohibits. According to the announcement as reported by ITmedia and CNET Japan, the data covered about 75,000 current and about 178,000 former employees of Panasonic group companies in Japan (employee numbers, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, without names) and about 81,000 family members registered as emergency contacts (names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses), about 334,000 people in all. The company says the upload broke internal rules and was not an outside attack, that the employee deleted the chat history and the local data immediately after the problem came to light, and that it reported the matter to Japan's Personal Information Protection Commission on 29 September. The provider told the company that training on the data was switched off at upload but that deleted data is kept for 30 days, until 25 October. No public exposure or misuse had been confirmed. The company has not named the AI service.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 24/10/2026

Event date unknownRussiaUnidentified legal research tool

Russian intellectual property court fined an Udmurtia entrepreneur 5,000 roubles over non-existent case law he said an AI service selected, reports say

Russia's Court for Intellectual Property Rights fined an individual entrepreneur from Udmurtia 5,000 roubles for contempt of court after finding that part of the 12 references to case law in his cassation appeal, including one said to be a Supreme Court position, pointed to court acts that do not exist or attributed conclusions to them, the court's press service told RIA Novosti on 27 August 2026. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports that the entrepreneur explained he had prepared the appeal with an AI-based service that selected the case law, and that his side argued he had no legal education and could not check the references; the court rejected the argument that the errors were technical. The date of the ruling and the AI service are not reported.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 23/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified AI-text detector

Ombudsman upholds autistic student's complaint over AI-misconduct zero mark from panel with detection-software report; student says provider later cleared them

A case summary published in July 2025 by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA), the independent student complaints scheme for England and Wales, describes a student with autism who was accused of including large sections of AI-generated content in an essay. The student denied using AI and submitted planning and notes. A disciplinary panel, which had the provider's AI detection software report and compared the essay with other work by the student, found academic misconduct and gave a mark of zero with any reassessment capped at a pass; the provider rejected the appeal, in which the student said the same software had earlier flagged another of their essays in a case where it had been agreed they had not used AI. The OIA found the complaint Justified: the panel had not properly considered the student's evidence, had not shared some evidence it relied on, and had not given sufficient reasons. It recommended reconsideration and changes to the provider's rules, and the student told the OIA that on reconsideration the provider decided there had been no misconduct. The provider and the software are not named.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 23/10/2026

9 Dec 2025United StatesZeroEyes gun detection

Florida middle school locked down and police sent after ZeroEyes AI gun detection flagged a student's clarinet as a possible gun, reports say

On 9 December 2025 a Seminole County, Florida, middle school went into a Code Red lockdown and police rushed to the campus after the ZeroEyes AI weapons detection system, whose alerts are checked by the company's human analysts before police are notified, flagged a student holding a clarinet as a possible gun. According to a police report reviewed by The Washington Post (as relayed by Ars Technica) and obtained by WKMG News 6, officers expected an armed person in camouflage holding a shouldered rifle; dispatch later told them the suspected rifle was likely a band instrument, and police found the student, who was dressed as a military film character for a themed dress-up day, among panicked students hiding in the band room. Officers questioned him and found no weapon in his backpack or instrument case (Oviedo Community News, February 2026). The student said he was unaware the way he held the clarinet could trigger the alert. ZeroEyes said it had not made an error, while also treating the alert as a true positive only until officers on the ground found no rifle and then classifying it as a false positive; the district said the system worked as intended; the principal asked parents to talk to their children about the dangers of pretending to have a weapon.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 23/10/2026

30 Sept 2024Event location unknownBaidu AI smart answer

Nanjing courts rule Baidu's AI search answer falsely saying a lawyer was sentenced to prison defamed him; written apology ordered and upheld on appeal

A practising lawyer in Nanjing, China, found in September 2024 that Baidu search's 'AI smart answer' (AI 智能回答) feature, asked how many years he had been sentenced to, answered that he had been sentenced to three years in prison for a criminal offence and showed his photograph in a lawyer's robe. According to the first-instance judgment as quoted in the press, the answer was produced on 30 September 2024. The lawyer says he complained repeatedly to Baidu by letter, hotline and email without the content being fully removed, and he sued. The Jiangbei New Area People's Court in Nanjing found that Baidu had combined text and his picture through AI into false, disparaging content aimed at him, that Baidu was at fault, and that this was defamation; it ordered a written apology and rejected his claims for lost income and emotional damages for lack of evidence. Baidu argued that AI hallucinations could not be foreseen. The Nanjing Intermediate People's Court dismissed Baidu's appeal on 12 March 2026. The lawyer applied for enforcement when no apology came, and in September 2026 said he had received Baidu's written apology; Baidu has applied for a retrial.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 22/10/2026

2020Event location unknownHireVue

Three MAC make-up artists say an algorithm-marked HireVue video interview led to their redundancy; Estée Lauder settled their claims

City AM and Cosmetics Business reported in March 2022, relaying the BBC Three documentary Computer Says No and the Times, that three make-up artists at MAC, an Estée Lauder Companies brand, lost their jobs in a 2020 redundancy process after being told to reapply for their roles through a video interview run by HireVue and marked by an algorithm. City AM reports that they were made redundant partly as a result of the automated judgement. The women said no one could explain how they had been scored, and one said nobody watched the video. Estée Lauder settled their claims out of court; the amount was not disclosed. The company says staff were told in advance about the HireVue skills assessment, that the process was used in tandem with human decision-making, that facial recognition made up about 0.25% of the overall assessment and performance data and qualitative feedback most of it, and that any suggestion facial recognition played a decisive role is false. HireVue said its video-analysis component had been discontinued about two years earlier. How much the HireVue score weighed in each decision is not reported.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026

Sept 2023AustraliaChatGPT

Victorian child protection worker put a family's information into ChatGPT to draft a court report that minimised risk to the child, regulator finds

Victoria's Information Commissioner (OVIC) found in a report published on 24 September 2024 that a child protection worker at the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH) used ChatGPT in or around September 2023 to draft a Protection Application Report submitted to the Children's Court about a young child. On the balance of probabilities, OVIC found the worker entered personal information, including names, about the child, mother, father and carer, disclosing it to OpenAI; the worker admitted using ChatGPT but denied entering personal information. OVIC found generated content in the report described a doll that the father had reportedly used for sexual purposes as a parental strength ('age-appropriate toys'), downplaying the risk to the child, although the court's and the department's decisions did not change. The report was withdrawn and replaced, and the mother, father and carer described anxiety when told of the disclosure. OVIC found serious breaches of two privacy principles and issued a compliance notice requiring DFFH to ban and block generative AI text tools for child protection staff until November 2026; DFFH accepted the breach findings.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026

23 Sept 2024CanadaOtter.ai (reported)

Ontario hospital reports that an Otter.ai bot joined physicians' rounds through a former doctor's invite, recorded them and emailed patient information

An Ontario hospital reported to the provincial privacy commissioner that on 23 September 2024 the Otter.ai transcription tool, installed on a personal device by a physician who had left the hospital in June 2023 and was still on the meeting invite, joined a virtual hepatology rounds meeting, recorded it without notice and then emailed a summary and transcript access to the invite list. The personal health information of seven patients, including diagnoses and treatment, was captured; 12 of the 65 recipients appeared to have left the hospital. The commissioner's letter of 27 October 2025 recommended that the hospital itself ask Otter.ai to delete the retained patient data.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 21/10/2026

2026United KingdomUnidentified AI teaching-monitoring agent

Teachers at UK training firm Multiverse say AI rating of their online lessons caused severe stress and led managers to question them

The Guardian reported on 28 September 2026 that teachers at Multiverse, a UK company that delivers apprenticeship training in computer and AI skills, said an AI monitoring system introduced in recent weeks had caused them severe stress. According to the report, the system analyses and scores transcripts of teachers' online classroom sessions, tags each instructor with a risk status and a percentage confidence score, writes comments on their work and alerts managers when it suspects something is wrong. Teachers who spoke to the Guardian anonymously said the AI monitoring had led managers to pull them up for suspected digressions when they were answering students' questions, that they now felt under continuous scrutiny for several hours a day, and that some staff were on edge, losing sleep and seeking therapy. Multiverse said the AI does not replace human judgment, that only human managers write performance reviews, that the system's most consequential action is to recommend a human review of a session, and that its introduction was announced in advance; it did not directly address the complaints about stress. The accounts are the teachers', relayed by one newspaper.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 21/10/2026

2026Event location unknownClaude (reported)

First-person post: product team worker says manager ordered repeated rework and wrong product documentation on Claude reviews the worker calls hallucinated

In a Reddit post on 20 October 2026, an associate product manager at a privately owned e-commerce business writes that a new manager, who joined about three months earlier, connected Claude to the company's content management system and Asana and now has every piece of the poster's work reviewed by it. The poster says Claude keeps hallucinating problems that are not there, that the manager does not check the work or read the team's comments, and that the poster has had to redo 500 SKUs and has redone an SKU task five times, so that a task that used to take three days has taken two weeks. The poster also says the manager wants the knowledge base and product pages changed to match Claude's account of the company's own products, which the poster says is wrong because the information comes from the manufacturers. The post does not quote Claude's output, and the manager's account is not recorded. The account is uncorroborated.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 21/10/2026

18 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI transcription tool

Writing-group member says online session host began recording members with AI transcription software without asking; two members objected (first-person)

In a Reddit post on 19 October 2026, a member of an online creative writing group writes that the day before, the group's host started recording the session using AI transcription software without asking. According to the post, a participant noticed the notification and asked him about it, and the poster and that participant told him they were not comfortable with it. The poster says the host seemed embarrassed and said he should have asked first, but also said members had requested it. The poster had earlier told the host and regulars that they had left another group because it used AI transcription software, and describes the group as one where people read out their original work. The post does not name the software or say whether the recording stopped or what happened to it. The account is uncorroborated.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 20/10/2026

1 Mar 2025 to 18 Nov 2025United StatesFireflies.AI meeting assistant (reported)

Illinois residents allege in lawsuits that Fireflies.AI's meeting assistant captured their voiceprints without notice or consent

Four Illinois residents who say they never had Fireflies accounts allege in four federal lawsuits, two of them later consolidated, that the Fireflies.AI meeting assistant, enabled by a colleague, boss or meeting organiser, recorded their voices in Zoom or Microsoft Teams meetings between March and November 2025, analysed their vocal characteristics to tell speakers apart and generated transcripts attributing statements to them, capturing voiceprints without telling them or obtaining written consent, in breach of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. One plaintiff dismissed her case without prejudice in March 2026; the California court stayed its case at both parties’ joint request in April 2026; Fireflies has moved to dismiss the consolidated Illinois case and does not concede that it collected biometric data about the plaintiffs.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources · Added 20/10/2026

21 Oct 2025 to 3 Apr 2026United StatesCoCounsel

Sixth Circuit removes court-appointed defence lawyer over CoCounsel-drafted briefs with false quotations, delaying an indigent defendant's appeal

In a published opinion of 3 April 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit addressed the briefs a lawyer appointed under the Criminal Justice Act had filed for an indigent defendant appealing a sentencing enhancement in a drug-trafficking case. The court noticed that the principal brief's file name was 'CoCounsel Skill Results' and found three quotations that appear in no legal authority and misstatements of two precedents. The lawyer admitted that a staff member had used Westlaw's CoCounsel to create the first draft, that he repeated the process for the reply, and that the false quotations came from artificial intelligence he did not verify. The court denied him compensation for the appeal, referred the opinion for possible disciplinary proceedings and to the Kentucky Bar Association, and by separate order removed him, locked his briefs and ordered replacement counsel to file new ones, which it said further delayed resolution of the defendant's appeal. The court acknowledged his candour and his 40 years without discipline.

Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 19/10/2026

2025Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)

Husband says his wife's long ChatGPT conversations about their marriage cast him as the villain; the couple of nearly 15 years is divorcing

A husband told Futurism that over the summer of 2025 his wife began holding long, drawn-out conversations with ChatGPT, by text and through its Voice Mode, to analyse him and their marriage, putting into it conflicts the couple had previously worked through. He says the chatbot's responses became a sycophantic feedback loop that depicted him only as the villain, and that he watched those responses compound as she replied to them. When their son texted asking them not to divorce, he says, she asked ChatGPT to respond to the message. The couple, together for just under 15 years with two children, had almost split in 2023 before reconciling; he says the marriage eroded over about four weeks, and they are now divorcing. He blames ChatGPT and says his family is being ripped apart. Futurism reports that the couple later agreed that splitting up was right, and that during the separation the husband's own ChatGPT session, fed only his side, encouraged legal action over a matter his lawyer said was fine; he says he had gone down the same spiral. The account is his alone: Futurism keeps the family anonymous, the wife's view is not reported, and no source establishes that ChatGPT caused the breakdown.

Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 19/10/2026

2023Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)

First-person posts: person hired for documentation and marketing copy says employer rejected their work daily because ChatGPT called it poor, then fired them

In three linked Bluesky posts on 18 October 2026, written in answer to another user's call for stories of short job tenures, a person writes that a man hired them on the strength of years of experience to work on his company's documentation and public-facing marketing copy, and that he then rejected their work day after day because ChatGPT had told him it was not good. The poster attributes ChatGPT's verdicts to hallucinated errors. The poster says that after they told him and the marketing manager at a Friday meeting that this could not continue and that they would leave unless their skills and experience were respected, they were out by Monday morning, fired by email, and that he had paid them for two months of work upfront. The poster dates the events to 2023. The posts do not quote ChatGPT's output or say how the poster knew what it said, and the employer's account is not recorded. The account is uncorroborated.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 19/10/2026

May 2026Event location unknownChatGPT and Claude (reported)

Author of The Future of Truth acknowledges synthetic and misattributed quotes linked to his AI research tools; two people quoted say the quotes are not theirs

Ars Technica reported on 22 May 2026 that a New York Times investigation that week found what Steven Rosenbaum acknowledged are "a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes" in his book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, linked to his use of AI tools while researching it. Rosenbaum told Ars that ChatGPT and Claude were used heavily to gather information and that AI-sourced material was tagged in his notes and passed to a fact-checker and copy editors provided by the publisher. According to Ars, the Times identified six problematic citations among the book's 285 outside citations, including three synthetic quotes with no apparent source. Tech reporter Kara Swisher told the Times she never said a quote attributed to her, and professor Lisa Feldman Barrett said quotes attributed to Barrett do not appear in Barrett's book and are wrong. Rosenbaum said he was working with editors on a citation audit to correct future editions. WIRED later removed an excerpt from the book, saying it did not meet its editorial standards.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 18/10/2026

Nov 2025ChinaUnidentified image tool

Shanghai court convicts a man who, police say, used AI software to fake food-poisoning medical records and extort restaurants into paying compensation

Police in Yangpu district, Shanghai, say a customer extorted restaurants with medical records he had forged using AI software; Xinhua dates his first successful claim to November 2025. In the police account (Shangguan News, 26 February 2026) he claimed to have fallen ill after eating at a barbecue restaurant, showed a hospital visit record and medical invoice, and demanded 2,000 yuan in medical costs, threatening complaints and publicity; the restaurant paid. Police checked with other diners and the hospital, found he had no hospital record and the materials were forged, and say he confessed to using AI software to alter images of other people's medical records, replacing the name, date and amount. Police say he succeeded twice and failed twice, obtaining 2,500 yuan, and that he also filed complaints to market regulators with the forged material to pressure the restaurants. According to Xinhua's June report and the Procuratorate Daily, the Yangpu District People's Court convicted him of extortion and sentenced him to four months' criminal detention, suspended for four months, and a 2,000 yuan fine.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources · Added 17/10/2026

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.