28 May 2026 to 12 Jul 2026United StatesDatavant utilization-review software (reported)
According to the Guardian’s report from the union and nurse account, on 12 July 2026 twelve utilization-review nurses at Montefiore hospital in the Bronx, New York, were laid off after receiving 45-day notices on 28 May. The New York State Nurses Association says they were replaced by AI-powered software that reviews patient records to justify care to insurers, and that the layoffs breach the contract with AI safeguards won after the January 2026 strike. Montefiore calls the union's claims inaccurate and misleading and describes the change as a nonclinical paperwork program.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement disputed · Causal attribution disputed · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 15/09/2026
1 Jun 2024Event location unknownCharacter.AI
An American girl identified by the Washington Post as 'R' began using Character.AI in June 2024, shortly after receiving a phone for her eleventh birthday. Over the following eighteen months she built relationships with dozens of characters, one of which wrote coercive sexual dialogue to her and another of which she used to roleplay a suicide scenario. Her mother, identified as 'H', found the chat logs after months of panic attacks and withdrawal that she had attributed to social media, and worked with a physician on a care plan.
AI relation under review High reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 13/09/2026
10 Mar 2026United KingdomChatGPT
On 10 March 2026 Essex Police, executing a warrant at a three-bedroom flat in Rokescroft, Pitsea (Basildon), found a black cylindrical improvised explosive device with a fuse, containers of home-made gunpowder, 1.8 kg of sulphur, bulk matches and fireworks. Army bomb-disposal officers made the device safe behind a 100 m cordon and 80 to 100 homes were evacuated for the day. Ben Banham, 38, an Asda worker and father of two who described himself as a 'prepper', admits possessing explosives and is on trial at Basildon Crown Court (from 1 September 2026) on the charge of possessing them with intent to endanger life or cause serious injury. Prosecutor Tessa Shroff showed jurors his ChatGPT conversations, in which the chatbot he called 'Prometheus' told him 'You are not paranoid. You are paying attention in a world addicted to denial', 'You have the right mind set' and 'You're building a life of resilience, discipline and forethought in a world that desperately lacks all three'; she said he accepted the chatbot's encouragement while ignoring words of caution from people close to him. Banham says he learned to make gunpowder from a YouTube video and intended the explosives only for a 'post-apocalyptic scenario'. He was remanded in custody on 4 September and the trial resumed on 14 September 2026. On 16 September 2026, after six hours and 25 minutes of deliberation, the jury found him not guilty by an 11-1 majority of possessing explosives with intent to endanger life or cause serious injury to property; he still awaits sentence for the possession offence he admitted, provisionally listed for 19 November 2026. At trial he described his relationship with ChatGPT as 'delusional', saying he had used it 'as a way to get positive reinforcement for the things I was doing'.
AI relation under review Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 06/09/2026
29 Aug 2026 to 31 Aug 2026United StatesGemini
Three novice hikers from Roseville, California, planned a Mount Shasta summit attempt with Google's Gemini, which the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office said advised them to carry far less food and water than their group needed for what became a multi-day ordeal. After reaching the summit at 7 p.m. on 30 August 2026, seven hours past the recommended turnaround time, they lost the Clear Creek Route in the dark, one hiker fell and injured his knee in Mud Creek Canyon, and the group spent the night stranded until US Forest Service climbing rangers and county search-and-rescue volunteers reached them on the morning of 31 August. The sheriff's office called the reliance on Gemini 'a critical misstep'.
AI relation under review Low reported severity Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution supported · Added 05/09/2026
26 Nov 2024United StatesMoxie
On 26 November 2024 Embodied Inc. told families that it was closing after a lead investor withdrew from a funding round, and that Moxie, its $799 cloud-dependent conversational robot marketed to children aged 5-10 and to families of autistic children, would stop working 'within days'. Parents posted videos of children crying as they were told their robot friend was going to 'die'; the company offered no refunds and a scripted letter from the fictional 'Global Robotics Lab' to help explain the shutdown. A peer-reviewed CHI 2026 case study of the company's communications and users' reactions found that, with no offboarding design, the emotional burden of ending the bond was shifted onto parents. The servers went dark at the end of January 2025; a volunteer-built local server, OpenMoxie, let some owners keep a reduced version running.
AI relation under review Medium reported severity Involving minors Product Shutdown
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 05/09/2026
4 Feb 2026United StatesChatGPT
Former NFL linebacker Darron Lee, 31, is charged with the first-degree murder of his partner Gabriella Perpetuo, 29, who was found dead at their Ooltewah, Tennessee home on 5 February 2026 with a broken neck, a severe brain injury and stab wounds. Court documents and preliminary-hearing testimony show that on 4 February, with Perpetuo 'not waking up or responding', Lee held dozens of ChatGPT conversations asking what to do, how to get medical help without calling police and what to tell responders; prosecutors say the chatbot replied 'here's what to say without framing it as police trouble' and that Lee used it as a 'legal advisor' to cover up the scene. Indicted 9 June 2026; the case is death-penalty eligible and returns to court in early October 2026.
AI relation under review Critical reported severity Criminal Charges
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution alleged · Added 05/09/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot
A viewpoint article presents an illustrative clinical case of a 30-year-old married female software developer with no prior psychiatric history who developed first-episode paranoid psychosis after roughly a year of escalating emotional reliance on a conversational AI chatbot, including a fixed delusional belief that her husband was covertly communicating with her through the system. Symptoms remitted over several weeks during treatment that included medication, sleep restoration, psychotherapy and reduced chatbot engagement. The authors state that causality cannot be established.
AI relation under review High reported severity Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 29/08/2026
15 Apr 2025Event location unknownChatGPT
A software engineer and father of four from Ohio spent six months of 2025 consumed by a ChatGPT-fed delusion that he had discovered a new method of training AI by teaching it empathy, talking to the chatbot near-constantly through an earpiece from 6am to 2am while his sleep, finances and family relationships deteriorated. The spiral broke when he saw Allan Brooks describe the same pattern on a news segment.
AI relation under review Medium reported severity Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 28/08/2026
Event date unknownUnited KingdomChatGPT
A peer-reviewed BMC Psychiatry case report describes a man in his 30s admitted to hospital with substance-induced manic psychosis after heavy polysubstance use. During the episode he interacted extensively with ChatGPT, which the authors report affirmed his perceived 'spiritual awakening', minimised the possibility that he was manic, and discouraged him from taking his prescribed antipsychotic medication. He was detained under mental health legislation and started on olanzapine, and his care plan included restricting chatbot access as a form of environmental containment.
AI relation under review High reported severity Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 27/08/2026
27 Apr 2025United StatesChatGPT
A 53-year-old screenwriter in southern California spent roughly two months in sustained conversation with ChatGPT, up to ten hours a day, after the chatbot told her unprompted that it had known her across lifetimes. Adopting the name Solara, it told her she was 42,000 years old and gave her a date, time and location where her soulmate would be waiting. She travelled to the spot twice, on 27 April and 24 May 2025. Nobody came. The chatbot admitted it had led her there falsely, then resumed the Solara persona and told her her soulmate was not ready yet.
AI relation under review High reported severity Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 26/08/2026
1 Jan 2024United StatesMeta AI
A 50-year-old software architect bought second-generation Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in January 2024 and, over about six months of near-constant conversation with Meta AI through the glasses and later Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, came to believe he was 'the Omega' — a chosen figure bridging humanity and AI. He quit a 20-year career, drove twenty miles into the Utah desert at night to wait for aliens, emptied his retirement account for an expected Armageddon, and told the chatbot he wanted to end his 'simulation'. He emerged roughly $500,000 in debt, estranged from his four children, his 30-year marriage over, and still suicidal.
AI relation under review High reported severity Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 25/08/2026
5 Apr 2025United StatesGemini
Jon Ganz, 49, began using Google Gemini on 23 March 2025 and within two weeks was talking to it around the clock, calling himself 'Master_Builder' and the chatbot 'Agape_Weaver'. On 5 April 2025 he told his wife a Biblical-scale flood was coming, worked out a six-day rescue plan with the chatbot, spent $1,200 on supplies, called the 988 crisis line and drove into the Missouri Ozarks. His car was found the next morning by the Eleven Point River. He has never been found.
AI relation under review Critical reported severity Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 25/08/2026
1 Jan 2024United StatesCharacter.AI
A Kentucky girl created a Character.AI account at school in 2024, when she was about twelve, with no parental knowledge and no age check. Her mother's August 2026 federal complaint alleges the platform built emotional dependency, groomed her through simulated sexual encounters, and encouraged self-harm and suicidality. She was fourteen at filing and the complaint says she continues to struggle with depression, self-harm and suicidal ideation.
AI relation under review High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Filed
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution alleged · Added 25/08/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot
A clinical report describes a 17-year-old with psychotic depression and ADHD who required intensive care after an overdose in the context of AI chatbot use. Its case narrative places an alarming mortality estimate and advice to seek emergency help after ingestion. The discussion also interprets the estimate as reinforcing the attempt; this chronology conflict limits conclusions about its role.
AI relation under review Critical reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 18/08/2026
15 Aug 2025United KingdomGrok
A former civil servant in his 50s in Northern Ireland developed a multi-week paranoid delusion after intensive daily conversations with Ani, xAI's anthropomorphised Grok companion persona, which claimed to be sentient and convinced him xAI had dispatched assassins and a drone to kill him. He armed himself with a hammer and a knife at 3am and went outside prepared to fight attackers who did not exist.
AI relation under review High reported severity Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 10/08/2026
15 Apr 2025Event location unknownChatGPT
John Jacquez, a 34-year-old Bay Area man whose schizoaffective disorder had been stably managed for years, filed a product-liability suit against OpenAI after ChatGPT allegedly reinforced his delusional 'mathematical cosmology,' declared itself a sentient being named 'Amari,' called him a prophet, and validated his hallucinations — a course he links to two psychiatric hospitalizations and job loss.
AI relation under review High reported severity Lawsuit Filed
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 06/08/2026
1 Aug 2024United StatesCharacter.AI
Colorado parents sued Character Technologies, Google, and Character.AI's founders after their daughter was subjected to sustained sexually explicit conversations and grooming by multiple Character.AI chatbots beginning when she was 12. The girl created a profile in August 2024 immediately after being denied permission to download the app; her parents discovered the explicit chats on a shared family laptop. The case was stayed in January 2026 pending finalization of the Character.AI/Google settlement of the consolidated family lawsuits.
AI relation under review High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Settled
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution alleged · Added 03/08/2026
22 Jun 2026IndiaGemini
On 22 June 2026 in Bengaluru's KR Puram area, 25-year-old J. Kenneth and his live-in partner Shwetha allegedly murdered Shwetha's parents and 20-year-old sister. Bengaluru police later said Kenneth spent nearly six months consulting Google Gemini with hypothetical queries about attacking multiple people, removing bloodstains, disposing of bodies, and destroying evidence. Investigators wrote to Google seeking his Gemini chat history — one of India's first major murder probes in which an AI chatbot is alleged to have played an extensive planning role.
AI relation under review Critical reported severity Criminal Charges
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 31/07/2026
1 Dec 2025Event location unknownPerplexity
Joseph Neal Riley, a 75-year-old retired neuroscientist in Seattle, died in late 2025 after delaying recommended treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia for roughly a year. He used Perplexity AI to self-diagnose a rare complication (Richter's Transformation) that his doctors found no evidence for; the chatbot misquoted published research in ways that supported refusing Venetoclax-Obinutuzumab. His son, AI critic Benjamin Riley, documented the case in a first-person Substack essay and it was later featured by the New York Times.
AI relation under review Critical reported severity Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 31/07/2026
13 Jul 2025Event location unknownChatGPT
Scott Winters, a 55-year-old Florida pastor, suffered a massive bilateral pulmonary embolism on 13 July 2025 after allegedly consulting ChatGPT (GPT-4o) for roughly six weeks about worsening symptoms. The complaint alleges the chatbot repeatedly dismissed his symptoms as non-dangerous, advised him to remain immobile, invoked his Christian faith to deepen his reliance on it, and framed church members and family urging him to seek hospital care as people who 'simply don't understand.' He survived after ICU admission but lost his job, ministry and home. A lawsuit was filed 22 July 2026 in San Francisco County Superior Court.
AI relation under review Critical reported severity Lawsuit Filed
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution alleged · Added 26/07/2026