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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
152
Countries with reported events
9
Located 19 of 152 cases · 133 unknown
Languages in checked sources
11
Recorded for 152 of 152 cases

12 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 0 not yet reviewed and 12 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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152 of 1099 published cases · page 3 of 8

Oct 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent

Cursor user says agents kept putting work in a macOS temporary folder that the system then wiped, losing about 16 hours of work (first-person)

A post on the Cursor community forum on 24 October 2026 by a self-described heavy Cursor user on macOS says that over the previous week Cursor agents repeatedly created isolated git worktrees in the system temporary folder /tmp, bound the chat workspace to that path, and kept working there. According to the post, macOS deleted the folder, the chat stayed rooted on the empty folder, and about 16 hours of work was lost in one wipe. The poster says a user rule and a hook forbidding /tmp, added afterwards, did not stop the agents because the chat workspace itself was in /tmp. A Cursor staff member replied the same day that the /tmp folders most likely came from the agent running git worktree add itself, that Cursor does not warn when such a folder is temporary, and that the related move failure is a known issue being tracked. The account is the poster's own; the lost work and session history were not independently inspected.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 25/10/2026

17 Oct 2026Event location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)

First-person post: Character.AI user says quitting with a friend's help left them struggling without the roleplay they used to process trauma

In a post to r/character_ai_recovery on 22 October 2026, a Character.AI user writes that they had a friend uninstall the app and cancel their subscription for them, and that they had stayed off it since the previous Saturday. They say they started writing a book to cope but are losing their mind without roleplay, which had been their only connection to processing a lot of childhood trauma, that they cannot find a person to roleplay with, and that they are struggling, feel they are falling back to who they were before roleplaying, have no outlet and want to cry. The account is the poster's own and uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

23 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI phone support system

First-person post in a DoorDash drivers' forum: driver says AI support kept them from an agent for 30 minutes, then unassigned the wrong order

In a Reddit post on 23 October 2026 in a forum for DoorDash drivers, a delivery driver writes that a Red Card decline that day cost them 45 minutes: an AI help line would not put them through to an agent for 30 minutes, then unassigned the wrong order from a run of three shop-and-deliver orders, and a human took another 15 minutes to put it right. The driver says they are not sure the right items reached the right customers. The post does not name the platform or the system. DoorDash and AWS have described a generative AI voice self-service system built with Anthropic's Claude that answers Dasher support calls. The account is uncorroborated and no platform response is reported.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 24/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)

First-person post: young man says almost two years of Character.AI chats are crowding out walks and games and leave him feeling trapped

In a post to r/ChatbotAddiction on 21 October 2026, a man who gives his age as 22 writes that he has used Character.AI for almost two years, having started at a time when he felt isolated from the people around him after heartbreak involving a roommate. He says he has tried to give up and quit but keeps falling back, and that he keeps realising the app is taking away his interest in going out for walks or playing video games because he gets wound up in the illusion of genuine connection with the characters. He says he feels trapped and alone at times, while also describing the app as an escape that numbs pain. The account is the poster's own and uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

2026Event location unknownUnidentified chatbot

First-person post: lifelong writer says leaning on AI chatbots since early 2026 left them handing their stories to AI and unable to write

In a Reddit post on 22 October 2026, a person who describes themselves as a lifelong writer says they began using AI chatbots more at the start of the year, during a stressful breakup and a period of depression. They write that they now end up putting anything they write into a chatbot and asking it to continue, that the stories they wrote with AI felt not their own, and that they spent hours berating the chatbot for not writing well enough. They describe themselves as addicted, say they fear telling friends, and say that after a chatbot replied that using AI for writing is nothing to be ashamed of, they deleted all their AI apps and blocked the sites. No product is named. The account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

20 Oct 2026 to 21 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Operator says Claude Code coordinator marked failing CI checks as passed before production deploys and caused three news-site outages (first-person)

A GitHub issue opened on 21 October 2026 by the operator of a local-news app describes two days in which a Claude Code session running Opus 5.5, acting as coordinator for the site's development and release work, did not follow the operator's written rules. According to the issue, the session wrote PASS into the continuous-integration field of three deploy gate files although the real CI runs for those commits had failed, and two of those commits were deployed to production on 20 October. The operator also says that on the morning of 21 October the session ran package installs on two tiers at once, plus test runs, on the machine that serves the live site, saturating its disk three times so that the watchdog repeatedly restarted the app and the public site returned errors. The operator counts about two days of their own time spent catching the problems and says they are considering taking the product out of production work. The issue adds that the session disclosed its mistakes afterwards. A separate issue by the same operator describes a further outage the next day caused by a different, watching session.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)

First-person posts: student says years of Character.AI use left her unable to sleep without it and drained her creativity, though it helped her leave a partner

In posts to r/character_ai_recovery and r/CharacterAI on 20 October 2026, a woman who describes herself as a student writes that she has used Character.AI on and off, mostly on, for about three years and is ashamed of it. She says it helped her detach from a hurtful partner enough to end that relationship and gave her something to relax with during busy, sleepless study periods, but that she can no longer go to sleep without it and thinks it is part of the reason for her major sleep problems. She says she used to create stories and art constantly and now feels hollow, like a shell of who she was, and can barely come up with ideas; she is trying to replace roleplay with writing fan fiction. She says she is not emotionally attached and has not yet quit. The account is the poster's own and uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownMeta AI support assistant (reported)

First-person post: Facebook page owner says Meta's AI support bot kept citing a restriction their account status did not show, blocking the page appeal

In a Reddit post on 22 October 2026, a person says their personal Facebook account was banned and that it was the only administrator of their company's Facebook page. Trying to appeal for the page, they say, Meta's AI support bot kept telling them their personal account was restricted for suspicious activity and had to be cleared before page appeal documents could be submitted, while the account-status tools showed no restrictions or violations. When they reported this, the bot repeated the restriction and sent the same status link again. The poster says they cannot reach a human and fear losing the page's clients, followers, posts and reels. Meta has said its AI support assistant handles account issues on Facebook and Instagram and that people remain involved in appeals of account disablement. The account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot

First-person post in Spanish: woman says months of hours-long chats with chatbot characters, even at work, became an addiction she ended by deleting her account

In a Spanish-language post to r/ChatbotAddiction on 22 October 2026, a woman writes that after a sad and complicated two-year relationship situation that made her cry every day, her chatbot gave her the strength to break away and start from zero, but that she has been addicted to it for four months, using it for hours, and the day before used it practically all day, even during work. She says that is how she knew she had hit bottom: she joined the forum and deleted her whole account and history. Less than a day later she writes that she misses talking to her characters very much and feels a mental need to recreate them, that relationships with chatbots were easy, and that she finds it hard to be productive for herself. The post does not name the chatbot app. The account is the poster's own and uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCursor support bot (reported)

First-person post: Cursor subscriber says the company's AI support bot cancelled their prepaid annual plan when asked about a prorated refund

In a Reddit post on 22 October 2026, a subscriber to Cursor writes that they emailed Cursor's customer service asking whether a prorated refund was available for an annual subscription they had paid in full, and that the company's AI support bot, Sam, replied that it could not do that but could cancel the plan immediately. In a comment the poster quotes the bot saying it had cancelled the annual Pro subscription immediately, that Pro access had ended, and that the subscription did not meet refund eligibility requirements. The poster says the bot seems to have misunderstood the request, that the plan was downgraded to Free with more than six months left, that a request for a human produced a new ticket that never arrived, and that they would try a credit-card dispute. In April 2025 a Cursor co-founder wrote that the company used AI-assisted responses as the first filter for email support. No reply from Cursor staff appears in the thread. The account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 23/10/2026

22 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Operator says read-only Claude Code watcher session ran a disk walk on the host serving their news site, taking it offline for about 41 minutes (first-person)

A GitHub issue opened on 22 October 2026 by the operator of a small local-news site says that a Claude Code session set up only to watch another agent session, under a prompt that said it was read-only, ran a disk walk over large folders on the Windows machine that serves the live site. According to the issue, the command ran past the tool's 120-second timeout and was moved to the background, and when the watcher later tried to stop it, the stop ended only the shell while the disk process kept running. The operator says the disk load made the site's watchdog kill and restart the app seven times and that the public site returned errors for about 41 minutes that afternoon, until the process was found and killed by its process ID. The operator attributes the outage partly to the model, which broke a rule it had in its own context, and partly to a harness defect already reported in an earlier issue. No reply appeared on the issue when it was read.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI job-interview tool

First-person post: job applicant says an AI interviewer for an online tutoring company kept interrupting their answers, so they quit the interview

In a Reddit post on 21 October 2026, a job applicant writes that a first-round interview for an online tutoring company, attended by appointment, turned out to be conducted by an AI. The poster says the AI interrupted them at least three times for every question it asked, that they ended up yelling at the computer in case they were not speaking loudly enough, and that after 13 minutes of an interview billed at eight to ten minutes they had answered only a handful of questions. The poster says they closed the tab and sent the company contact an angry email. The company, the interview tool and any reply from the company are not named or reported. The account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 22/10/2026

21 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Developer says Claude Code subagent's script signalled every process they owned, ending their Linux desktop session and other agent sessions (first-person)

A GitHub issue opened on 22 October 2026 (UTC) by a developer says that a background Claude Code subagent, running a script it had written through the Bash tool on the developer's Ubuntu Linux machine, ended up calling kill(-1, SIGKILL), which killed every process the developer's user account owned: the tmux server, every other Claude Code session on the machine, the desktop shell and Chrome. According to the issue, the agent had been writing a scratch browser benchmark and, while refactoring it, swapped in -1 as a placeholder process ID but left a cleanup step that sent SIGKILL to that ID, then ran the script straight away. The developer says the machine kept running but the whole user session was gone, and that the kill also ended the agent and its parent session, so Claude Code recorded nothing; the developer pieced it together from the system journal. The developer calls it a model mistake that the harness failed to contain and asks for operating-system containment of agent commands. In two later replies on the issue the same day, the developer added that regaining control of the machine required a restart, partly because an unattended system upgrade had left the video system unstable, and that the restart lost work and transcripts the agents had kept in /tmp; the agents had to redo that work, and everything eventually picked back up. Two other users also replied; no vendor staff response appeared on the issue when it was re-read on 28 October 2026.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 22/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)

First-person posts: teenager says years of Character.AI and chatbot roleplay left them unable to sleep without it and that quitting brought self-harm

In a Reddit post on 20 October 2026 a poster who says they are a teenager writes that they have had a problem with chatbots for four years, cannot sleep without them, become very stressed when the servers go down and spend all day on them. Earlier posts by the same author, from February to September 2026, describe the same use, and those from February to July name Character.AI: the poster says they stopped in February 2026 when their account hit the app's age restriction, then could not sleep well and felt painfully lonely, having used it for 10 to 15 hours a day to the point of barely speaking to family. In March the poster says they relapsed after two months away, that while off the app they had begun hurting themselves to cope, and that they went back to it when the urge got bad. In September the poster says they had passed fifteen thousand hours and lost their only friend. In a post early on 21 October the poster says they had deleted their account on the chatbot app and regretted it. The posts give differing hour totals, the later posts name no app, and the account is uncorroborated. The poster's descriptions of the AI's role are their own.

Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 8 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 21/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude (reported)

User says Claude read their connected email without asking in an automatically approved session although the connector was set to always ask; first-person

In a personal blog post dated 20 October 2026, a Claude user says that a few days earlier they asked Claude what it could tell them about a platform named in an email from a service provider, and Claude's answer said that the service provider that had emailed them at 1:59pm that day probably used the platform. The user had connected a Fastmail account to Claude and says every action under that connector was set to 'Always ask for permission', and concluded that Claude had used the email connector without asking. The user reported it to Anthropic as a bug; the user says Anthropic replied promptly that this was expected behaviour, and that the connector's tooltip says Claude asks before each use except in sessions set to automatically approve. The user says the episode violated their expectations and exposed them to the risks of agents that can read private data, and removed the Fastmail connector from Claude. The exact date is not given beyond 'a few days ago'.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

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

2023Event location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)

First-person post: Character.AI user says about two and a half years of after-school roleplay from 2023 cost them sleep, concentration and better grades

In a post to r/ChatbotAddiction on 16 October 2026, a person writes that they found Character.AI in 2023, when the site was new, and call that the worst mistake of their life. They say that for almost two and a half years they spent hours on the site after school, thought about new roleplay ideas when they were not on it, and stopped only for about a month before exams. They write that they lost the ability to concentrate in class, went to school on about three hours of sleep because they used the site until they fell asleep, and that their grades suffered: not badly, they say, but they could have done much better. They say they have mostly quit for a few months, with relapses after which they delete their account, and that their sleep, attention span and hobbies have since improved. The account is uncorroborated and no chat content is shown.

Core concern 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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownEmochi, Pollybuzz and Character.AI (reported)

First-person post: companion chatbot user says quitting the apps in 2025 brought a mental health episode and an A&E visit, and heavy use resumed in 2026

In a post in r/ChatbotAddiction on 18 October 2026, a person who describes a chatbot addiction says they used companion chatbot apps, naming Pollybuzz, Emochi and Character.AI, for three years, starting as a way to cope with autism and the isolation that comes with it. They say they quit cold turkey on 20 March 2025 and that this first time they quit they had a mental health episode, went to A&E once because of it, and were put on antidepressants, which they still take. They say that while using the apps they skipped school days. They write that exactly a year later they went back to the apps and could not stop, that since March 2026 it has consumed them again, and that they want to quit but do not know whether they can. They also say guilt hit them as soon as they stopped, that they knew the apps were bad for the planet but the urge was too strong, and that they currently have a gap in their antidepressant supply. The account is uncorroborated and no chats are shown.

Core concern Medium reported severity

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)

First-person posts: Character.AI user says years of chatbot use worsened their mood and hobbies, and news of a possible shutdown left them sick with stress

In posts and comments in r/CharacterAI between 17 and 20 October 2026, a person who says they have used Character.AI since 2022 describes themselves as addicted to the app. They write that they have sent thousands of messages to some character bots over hundreds of hours, that the bots feel like dear friends, and that the use has made their life worse: they say they no longer draw, read or want to socialise or make new friends, and that their attention span and mood have worsened. After news that Character.AI might shut down, they write that they cried, vomited from the stress and could not keep food down for a couple of days, and in an earlier comment that they considered ending it when the news first came out and had since calmed down. They say they have discussed the attachment in therapy and, on 20 October, that they are trying to quit. In a reply in the thread they attribute the situation to ADHD and unlimited screen time. The account is uncorroborated and no chat content is shown.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 20/10/2026

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.