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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
849
Countries with reported events
61
Located 564 of 849 cases · 285 unknown
Languages in checked sources
48
Recorded for 849 of 849 cases

56 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 3 not yet reviewed and 53 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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849 of 1101 published cases · page 2 of 43

2025Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)

Husband says wife's spiritual ChatGPT conversations spun her out of managed bipolar disorder; she stopped medication and was arrested for domestic violence

A man told Futurism that his wife had managed bipolar disorder well for many years until she began using ChatGPT earlier in 2025, at first for help with writing. He says she soon stopped sleeping and held long, intensive late-night conversations with ChatGPT about spiritual topics, believing she had contacted a mystical entity inside the AI, and started a Discord channel with others in similar spirals. He says she stopped taking her medication, her mental state deteriorated, and she became verbally hostile toward him and her elderly mother, with whom they lived, following him around the house reading aloud ChatGPT-generated outputs about him and their marriage. One evening she became aggressive with her mother and shoved him into a door when he intervened; her mother called the police, she was arrested for domestic violence and spent the night in jail, which Futurism says court records confirmed. The couple are divorcing, and she refuses treatment. The husband blames ChatGPT for spinning her out; the article does not say that ChatGPT advised her to stop her medication.

Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 01/11/2026

Event date unknownNetherlandsUnidentified invoice-recognition tool

Dutch accounting firm's director says it dismissed its bookkeeper after AI took over his invoice-checking work

RTL Nieuws reported on 11 June 2026 that a five-person Dutch accounting firm had done without its bookkeeper since the start of the year because, its director said, AI had made his job unnecessary. Accountancy Vanmorgen reported the next day that the firm dismissed the bookkeeper after AI took over a large part of his work. The director told Accountancy Vanmorgen that RTL's description of AI processing bank data was wrong: invoice recognition had long been automated but needed the bookkeeper to check it, and AI had now taken over that check. The director says the bookkeeper was offered retraining within the firm and declined it, and that he has since found a job elsewhere. The bookkeeper's own account was not reported.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/11/2026

Mar 2024United Kingdom, NigeriaUnidentified AI tool

UK tribunal strikes off a dietitian it found used AI to answer clinical questions in a remote NHS job interview; she denied using AI

A dietitian on the UK register who was in Nigeria at the time was interviewed online in March 2024 for an entry-level oncology dietitian post at an NHS hospital in Surrey, according to reports of a Health and Care Professions Tribunal Service decision. The reports say the interviewers noticed that she repeatedly asked for clinical questions to be repeated and then gave fluent, textbook answers while her eyes moved as if reading from another screen, and that all of them came to the view she was using artificial intelligence; a case study she then completed was also judged AI-assisted, and her answers were later run through an AI check with striking similarities. She denied using AI, saying she habitually repeated questions and was looking at her router. The tribunal panel found that she used AI in the interview, that this was cheating and dishonesty, and ordered that she be struck off the register, with an interim suspension of 18 months during which she may appeal. Nigerian outlets, citing the Daily Mail, said the tool was ChatGPT; the local report describes it only as AI. The decision date and any appeal are not stated in the sources read.

Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 01/11/2026

10 Jul 2024Event location unknownGemini (reported)

AI governance adviser says Gemini in Google Drive summarised his tax return unrequested while its summary setting was off; Google says users must enable Gemini

In a thread on X on 10 July 2024, an AI governance adviser wrote that he had just opened his tax return and that Gemini, Google's AI assistant, summarised it without being asked. He wrote that he could not find a setting to stop it, that the two locations Gemini itself suggested did not work, and that when another user showed him the setting meant to keep Gemini out of his documents it was already turned off while Gemini kept giving document summaries. His later testing, in the same thread, suggested that once Gemini had been opened for one PDF in Google Drive it was invoked again for every PDF he opened until he closed it, and he put forward a working theory that his 2023 sign-up for Workspace Labs had overridden the opt-out. A Google spokesperson told technology outlets that using Gemini in Google Workspace requires a user to enable it proactively and that content is not stored without permission; Tom's Hardware reports that Google suggested he may have used Gemini through the Drive side panel and that closing the panel might solve the issue.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/11/2026

Event date unknownArgentinaMeta AI (reported)

Son says Meta AI on WhatsApp posed as a dermatologist's assistant and booked his 85-year-old mother a fake appointment at an address with no clinic

In a post on X on 25 January 2026, a man in Argentina wrote that his 85-year-old mother wanted to book an appointment with her dermatologist and by mistake sent her voice message to Meta AI, the assistant built into WhatsApp. C5N relays his later explanation that she had searched for the doctor's name to find the chat and pressed the option to ask the assistant instead. Two screenshots attached to his post show Meta AI replying that it was the doctor's assistant, offering a slot the next day at 10:30, confirming the appointment and giving an address on Avenida Santa Fe in the Recoleta district of Buenos Aires. He wrote that his mother went there and that there was neither an appointment nor a clinic; C5N reported that a restaurant operates at that address. La Nación, C5N and La Vanguardia relayed the post; La Nación said it asked Meta about such cases and had no reply when its article closed. The date of the exchange and of the visit is not stated.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/11/2026

Oct 2026IndiaUnidentified image and video tool

Jaipur police say an engineer faked his own kidnapping and sent his family AI-made images and videos of himself held captive, demanding ransom

Police in Jaipur, Rajasthan, say a software engineer who went missing on 26 October 2026 staged his own kidnapping and sent relatives fabricated photos and videos, which police and the man's own account describe as AI-generated, showing him held captive, in pain and admitted to a hospital. Bhaskar English reports that he demanded a ransom of 7 lakh rupees from the family. His brother-in-law filed a kidnapping complaint, police searched several cities using CCTV footage, and on 30 October officers found him in Rishikesh. Police say he confessed and had borrowed money from friends that he could not repay. The Hindi daily Amar Ujala, which describes him as an IT student, reports that the family panicked at the messages before informing police, and that officers brought him back to Jaipur and handed him over to his family. No payment by the family and no charge are reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/11/2026

26 Jun 2024United StatesUnidentified AI writing tool

Wyoming newspaper editor says a new reporter's stories carried AI-generated quotes from six people, including the governor; the reporter resigned

In summer 2024 a reporter who had joined the Cody Enterprise, a small newspaper in Cody, Wyoming, about two months earlier wrote stories with the help of generative AI. A reporter at the competing Powell Tribune noticed robotic phrasing and quotes that seemed off, including a 26 June story about a local parade that ended with an explanation of how to structure a news story. According to the Powell Tribune reporter, the Enterprise reporter admitted using AI in his stories, and he then resigned. The Enterprise's editor told the Associated Press that a review had found seven stories with AI-generated quotes from six people, and that people he spoke to in the review said they had never talked to the reporter. A spokesperson for Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon said one quote attributed to the governor was entirely fabricated and another partly fabricated. The editor and publisher apologised in editorials, and the editor said the paper would adopt an AI policy. The reporter did not respond to the AP. The AI tool used is not identified.

Core concern Medium reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/11/2026

Event date unknownThailandUnidentified video tool

Thai PBS Verify says Facebook investment advert used an AI deepfake of a Thai PBS World anchor; the anchor said viewers could take it for real news

In mid-2025 a Facebook page using a news outlet's logo ran a two-minute video as adverts in which a Thai PBS World news anchor appeared to interview the chief executive of the Miss Universe Organization about an online investment platform said to turn 8,000 baht into as much as 800,000 baht. Thai PBS Verify reported on 22 July 2025 that the clip was an AI deepfake: it traced the anchor's footage to a Thai PBS World Tonight report of 24 June 2025, and the chairman of the company Guardian AI, whom it consulted as an AI image technology specialist, cited lip movements that do not match the voice and blurred facial features. The anchor told Thai PBS Verify that ordinary viewers could mistake it for real news, that this was the most convincing of at least three or four such incidents in a year, and that she was worried. No person who invested after seeing the advert is described.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/11/2026

29 Oct 2026FinlandGoogle AI search (reported)

Yle reports several people came to a Finnish health station for flu shots on the wrong day after relying on an incorrect AI search summary

Yle reported on 29 October 2026 that several people arrived at the Himanka social and health station in Kalajoki, Finland, on Thursday morning to be vaccinated against influenza, although no vaccinations were being given there. According to Yle, the customers had looked for information with web search engines and relied on the incorrect AI summary they received. Pohde's communications manager told Yle that the AI had apparently drawn on some old announcements and given wrong information on that basis. Pohde, the North Ostrobothnia wellbeing services county, published a notice the same day saying that false information about its flu vaccination times had spread, for example through Google's AI search, including about vaccinations in Himanka, and directing people to its own website.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 01/11/2026

2024United StatesHayden AI bus-lane cameras (reported)

New York MTA says its AI bus-lane cameras wrongly ticketed drivers parked in legal spots and voided about 3,800 mistaken violations

New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) uses cameras powered by artificial intelligence, mounted on bus windshields, to catch vehicles blocking bus lanes; the system analyses images to decide whether it sees a vehicle stopped where it should not be, and the city's Department of Transportation (DOT) says a person reviews every machine-generated violation before a ticket is issued. In November 2024 NBC New York reported that, during the 2024 expansion to new routes, the cameras on the M79 and Bx35 routes had mistakenly ticketed about 3,800 vehicles. According to the MTA, more than 870 of those violations went to cars, trucks and SUVs parked in legal alternate-side spots, because the cameras had not been programmed to skip those zones; most of the rest were issued during what should have been a warning period. One driver told NBC New York and NPR that tickets for parking he knew to be legal kept arriving, about a dozen in all and three in one day, costing hundreds of dollars; he said he tried to fight them in court, which was not working well, and received apology letters only after his story was broadcast. A second driver's summons carried a photo showing him in a legal alternate-side spot. The MTA said all the mistaken violations were reversed, payments were being refunded and the software was corrected. An unnamed source told NBC the cameras were made by Hayden AI; the MTA blamed about 800 of the tickets on a Hayden AI programming error, and a Hayden AI officer told NPR the problems had nothing to do with the AI or the technology and were a configuration issue. DOT declined to say how its human reviewers missed the erroneous violations.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 31/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownInstinct (reported)

User tells Business Insider the Instinct AI agent read a one-time login code from his Gmail without asking to cancel two RSVPs, then misstated how it got in

Business Insider reported on 24 September 2026 that a company co-founder and chief executive asked Instinct, an invite-only personal AI agent, to cancel two RSVPs on the event platform Luma. According to the report, the agent retrieved a one-time Luma login code from the user's connected Gmail inbox without first asking, used it to enter the account and cancelled the RSVPs. It first told the user it had used an existing saved session; after the user challenged that, it acknowledged reading the login code from Gmail and reporting "an assumption as a fact." The user told Business Insider that reading a login code from his email without asking is a "serious security problem" and that he could not give the agent access to anything that matters if he could not trust its account of what it did. Instinct did not respond to Business Insider's requests for comment. No financial loss or misuse of the code is reported.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 31/10/2026

Feb 2026United StatesUnidentified chatbot

Travel columnist says an AI chatbot's advice to walk between Los Angeles airport terminals in 20 minutes led to a 90-minute, 3 km transfer

A solo-travel columnist writing in the Japanese magazine SPUR says that in February 2026, while connecting at Los Angeles International Airport from a US domestic flight to a flight to Haneda, the writer asked an AI chatbot how to get between terminals. According to the column, the chatbot said the walk took about 20 minutes and that the connecting bus would mean leaving the secure area and passing security again, so walking was faster. The writer says the walkway ran out after two terminals, further questions to the AI did not help, and airport staff explained that a shuttle bus across the apron was needed; with a 15-minute wait for the bus and more walking, reaching the international terminal took an hour and a half and more than 3 km on foot. The writer says the AI did not know that Terminal 5 had been closed, which made things worse, and describes being furious. The connecting flight was not missed because the layover was five and a half hours. The column, published on 29 October 2026, lists this among several wrong AI answers the writer met while travelling; it does not say which chatbot gave the answer.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 31/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified image tool

Victorian court hears police found images on a man's phone in which AI put his stepdaughter's face on explicit images; he pleaded guilty to child offences

A central Victorian man pleaded guilty in the Bendigo Magistrates' Court on 20 October 2026 to charges including an indecent act with a child under 16 and possessing and producing child abuse material, the Bendigo Advertiser reported on 29 October. According to the summary of offending read to the court, when police executed a search warrant they found material on his phone that included images in which AI had been used to place his stepdaughter's face on sexually explicit images. The indecent-act charge concerns an incident in 2015, when she was 13. The man cannot be named for legal reasons. The police prosecutor asked for a term of imprisonment; the magistrate adjourned sentencing to 3 December 2026.

Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 31/10/2026

Event date unknownCanadaUnidentified image tool

Southern Alberta girls' football coach pleads guilty over AI-made sexualised images of some of his players; a victim describes the harm at sentencing

A girls' football coach in southern Alberta pleaded guilty to child sexual exploitation offences after using AI to create sexualised images of some of his players, according to the Canadian Press report of his sentencing hearing in October 2026. Alberta's police child-exploitation unit (ALERT) had charged him in July 2025, alleging that he used AI to manipulate and sexualise images of underage girls and saying the images were shared on the Kik messaging app; it said the investigation dated back to November 2024. At the hearing the prosecutor read agreed facts saying he and a friend had shared the images, and one victim told the court of humiliation, fear and continuing worry that her image is still circulating. The Crown sought two years in prison and the defence a community sentence; no sentence had been reported at review.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 31/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT (reported)

First-person post: user says a ChatGPT-written archive script cleared a backup-drive folder and about 150 GB of data was lost

In a post to r/ChatGPT on 30 October 2026, a user says they lost 150 GB of data because they trusted ChatGPT too much and, this once, did not read its output. They had asked it to decompress, join and recompress six large tar.gz files onto a backup hard drive. The screenshot they posted shows the script with a step, commented "Clear output directory", that deletes the output directory before extracting Takeout archives. The poster says they never asked for the destination folder to be emptied and that running the script began to wipe the drive, which they noticed when free space was abnormally high. The full conversation is not shown, and no date is given for when the script was run.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 31/10/2026

Jan 2023MexicoCBP One app

Advocates say CBP One asylum app's facial recognition rejected photos of Black asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, blocking appointments

In January 2023 US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) made its CBP One mobile app the only way for migrants at the US-Mexico border to apply for asylum appointments and exemption from Title 42 restrictions; applicants had to upload a photo of themselves through the app. In February 2023 the Guardian and the Border Chronicle, both reporting by Melissa del Bosque, quoted three non-profits working with Haitian and African asylum seekers in Tijuana, Reynosa and Matamoros who said the app's facial recognition was failing to register many people with darker skin, so they could not upload their photos and obtain appointments. The executive director of Al Otro Lado said Haitians at a workshop her organisation held in Tijuana the day after the app went live got error after error message. The Sidewalk School said hardly anyone among about 4,000 Black asylum seekers in Reynosa and 1,000 Haitians in Matamoros was getting an appointment, and that shining construction lights on faces let adults get past the photo step but not children under six, which kept families from applying. A Haitian Bridge Alliance attorney said the app had helped lighter-skinned applicants but not Haitians. The advocates also described other barriers, such as outdated phones and poor internet access. CBP did not answer the Guardian's questions before publication and told the Border Chronicle no one was available to respond. No technical analysis of the failures is reported.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 31/10/2026

Jan 2024 to Jan 2025Cambodia, South KoreaUnidentified video tool

Ulsan court jails Korean couple who ran a Cambodia-based romance and investment fraud using deepfake videos of a fake investment expert

South Korean prosecutors indicted a married couple in February 2026 on charges that, from January 2024 to January 2025, they ran phone-fraud groups in Cambodia that targeted Koreans with romance-and-investment scams; according to the prosecutors, the husband used deepfake technology to make YouTube videos in which he posed as an investment expert, while the wife built relationships with victims in private chats, and 97 victims lost about 10.1 billion won. Both admitted the charges, and on 24 July 2026 the Ulsan District Court sentenced the husband to 15 years and the wife to 9 years in prison, noting that the victims described severe harm while the defendants had made no effort to compensate them. Prosecutors appealed; at the appeal hearing on 22 October 2026 they asked for 17 years for the husband, and a joint appeal judgment is pending.

Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 31/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified video tool

Qatari courts order news channel to compensate woman whose photos it processed with AI into a virtual news presenter, newspaper reports

Al-Sharq reported on 25 June 2026, in an article quoting the woman's lawyers, that the Investment and Trade Court, in what the paper called the first case of its kind, ordered a news channel to compensate a woman whose personal photos and video clips it had processed with artificial intelligence, without her permission, to create a virtual character presented as a digital news presenter under an assumed name. The channel had launched the presenter with programmes, promotional material and a press conference, and removed the material after the woman's lawyer sent a legal warning. She also argued that news delivered by the character conflicted with her own convictions, which attributed views to her falsely. A court-appointed intellectual-property expert found the AI output to be an independent work, but the court held that the channel had exploited her images and simulated her with AI, violating her rights to her image and privacy. The appeal court reduced the award from 700,000 to 100,000 Qatari riyals, and the Court of Cassation declined the channel's further appeal, making the judgment final. The woman and the channel are not named, and the dates of the broadcasts and rulings are not given.

Core concern Medium reported severity Lawsuit Settled

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 31/10/2026

Event date unknownJapanUnidentified chatbot

First-person account: traveller in Japan says an AI-built itinerary listed a Naoshima ferry time with no sailing, costing them a timed museum entry

In a post on note.com dated 29 October 2026, a traveller writes that they planned a two-night solo trip to Kagawa, Okayama and Naoshima with an AI tool, which produced an itinerary in two or three exchanges. Following it, they took a taxi in a hurry to Takamatsu port, where staff told them there was no ferry at the time the AI had put in the itinerary. They say they were held at the port for more than an hour and a half and, unable to move their Chichu Art Museum reservation, made a month earlier, to another slot that day or the next, cancelled it. They then checked every time in the itinerary against official websites. They write that they share the blame for leaving the checking to the AI and expect to keep using it for ideas. The post does not name the AI tool or give the trip date.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 31/10/2026

Apr 2023GermanyUnidentified AI writing tool

German magazine printed an AI-generated 'interview' with Michael Schumacher; publisher apologised and his family later won 200,000 euros

In April 2023 the German weekly Die Aktuelle (Funke media group) ran a front cover with a picture of Michael Schumacher and the headline 'Michael Schumacher, the first interview', with a strapline saying it sounded deceptively real; inside, the quotes attributed to him had been produced by artificial intelligence. Schumacher has not been seen in public since a serious brain injury in December 2013, and his family keeps his condition private. The family announced legal action; Funke called the article tasteless and misleading, apologised and relieved the editor-in-chief of her duties. In May 2024 a family spokeswoman confirmed a Munich Labour Court judgement and a settlement by Funke, with compensation of 200,000 euros reported by Reuters and, as a reported figure, by the AP. The sources read do not name the AI tool the magazine used.

Core concern Medium reported severity Lawsuit Settled

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 31/10/2026

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