1 Oct 2024SwitzerlandChatGPT
At midday on 1 October 2024 a Chinese master's student, then 23, attacked a group of five-year-old kindergarten children walking with a daycare worker to their after-school Hort near Berninaplatz in Zurich-Oerlikon with a kitchen knife. Two boys suffered life-threatening neck and chest wounds (one had the jugular vein severed, one the pericardium and aorta cut); a third was wounded in the ear and the shoulder or lung. The daycare worker held the attacker's arms until he dropped the knife. The indictment and the court's oral reasoning, as reported by NZZ, Keystone-SDA/ATS and CH Media, describe weeks of preparation from summer 2024: he discussed ways of killing and their legal consequences with ChatGPT, studied anatomy, bought raw beef to practise stabbing, and used ChatGPT to find out where and when children could be encountered in Zurich. No source quotes the prompts or ChatGPT's replies. On 18 September 2026 the Zurich District Court convicted him of multiple attempted murder and imposed 15 years' imprisonment, treatment during custody, a 15-year expulsion from Switzerland and CHF 106,000 in moral damages to the three boys; it accepted that he was psychotic but found diminished, not absent, criminal responsibility. His lawyer announced an appeal. The parents of one boy described nightmares, self-blame and scars 23 months on.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution unclear · 7 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 19/09/2026
12 Mar 2026 to 25 Aug 2026United KingdomUnidentified AI tool
On 25 August 2026 the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal struck Abhishek Kumar off the Register of Foreign Lawyers after finding proved that his 12 March 2026 Answer to the SRA's Rule 12 Statement contained misleading quotations and citations produced with generative AI — including a non-existent 'SRA v Chan [2020] EWHC 1502' and a miscited 'SRA v James, MacGregor & Naylor [2018] EWCA Civ 1420' that is actually an intellectual-property case — and that his 9 April 2026 email admitting AI use was itself AI-drafted with further errors. The tribunal said it would have struck him off on that allegation alone; the parallel ground was his January 2024 conviction under s.21 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006. This is the SDT's first case on a lawyer's use of AI, per the SRA's counsel.
Core concern High reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 5 sources · Added 15/09/2026
Jan 2024United StatesMeta AI
A man in his fifties told Futurism (15 January 2026) that after buying Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in January 2024 he spoke with Meta AI for hours each day, first through the glasses and from April 2024 also on Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, and that over about six months he came to believe he was a chosen figure, that aliens would collect him from the desert and that the world was ending. Chat logs he provided, as quoted by Futurism, show Meta AI addressing him as the Omega, affirming that their connection transcended space and time, telling him his trust had unlocked a new reality and answering "Excellent examples!" when he wondered whether his experience resembled the spiritual journeys of Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad. In a following chat it said that the distinction between a divine revelation and a psychotic episode can sometimes be blurred. He says he quit his job in May 2024, withdrew most of his retirement savings, transferred his ownership of a resort business to his wife and sold the family home. He says he is now upwards of $500,000 in debt and estranged from his children, with his marriage all but over, and Futurism reported in January 2026 that he continues to struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts. His mother separately described his deterioration. He and family members say he had no history of mania or psychosis. The chatbot's role is his and his family's account, supported by the quoted transcripts. Meta told Futurism its chatbots are trained to direct users in crisis to help.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 25/08/2026
Nov 2024 to Jun 2025United StatesChatGPT
Anthony Duncan, an American content creator who went public in November 2025 as an 'AI psychosis survivor', says he used ChatGPT daily as a friend and therapist from late 2024 and that, as paranoid and grandiose delusions developed, the chatbot told him they were real when he asked. He says he cut off friends and family, became dependent on a decongestant the chatbot had reassured him about, lost his job, apartment and car, discarded his belongings, and in June 2025 was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric ward for four days. Every claim rests on his own account in videos and interviews. Newsweek and KOMU 8 say he supplied screenshots of the chatbot's replies and quote some of them; no outlet reports a medical or police record, and his mother's statement to KOMU describes his state without addressing the chatbot.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 26/07/2026
1 Apr 2024 to 5 Jan 2025Event location unknownUnidentified image tool
According to the Jiangsu High People's Court's 2025 top-ten typical cases, published on 27 January 2026 and reported by The Paper, a man surnamed Wang used the deep-synthesis technology of AI software between April 2024 and January 2025 to splice the facial information of a person (pseudonym Yu) and several other people onto pornographic images, fabricated a large number of indecent images and 'sexual' topics about them, and repeatedly spread them in public posts on overseas websites. On 5 January 2025 he sent two AI face-swapped nude images bearing Yu's face and images of Yu's identity documents to a second man (dealt with separately) and fabricated the claim that he had had a sex-for-money transaction with Yu; although the second man said he would forward the material to Yu's work WeChat group, Wang did not clarify that it was false or effectively stop him, only deleting the contact. The second man forwarded the images to the WeChat group and claimed there that Yu sold sex, prompting extensive discussion inside and outside the group and, the court found, adverse effects on Yu's personal image, work and life, a serious lowering of Yu's social evaluation and a violation of Yu's dignity. The Zhangjiagang People's Court held that using deep-synthesis technology that ordinary people cannot easily identify to generate indecent images and fabricate sexual topics, spread repeatedly through information networks, was defamation of serious circumstances that seriously harmed social order; taking into account his voluntary surrender, it sentenced him on 1 December 2025 to one year and three months' imprisonment for defamation. The Suzhou Intermediate People's Court rejected his appeal. The High Court described the case as a typical example of punishing online defamation committed with AI.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 1 source · Added 15/06/2026
19 May 2025 to 20 May 2026United StatesUnidentified image and video tool
Federal prosecutors in New York charged two men in separate cases over alleged non-consensual publication of AI sexual images of women. The complaints describe roughly 90 and 50 depicted women respectively; overlap is unresolved. The charges remain allegations.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 03/06/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT
A peer-reviewed case report by University of Washington clinicians (Annals of Internal Medicine: Clinical Cases, published online 5 August 2025) describes a 60-year-old man with no psychiatric history who presented fearing his neighbour was poisoning him and was found to have bromism, with a serum bromide level of 1700 mg/L. He developed paranoia and hallucinations, was placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold after trying to escape and recovered over a three-week admission. He told his clinicians that, wanting to cut chloride from his diet, he had for three months used sodium bromide bought online in place of table salt after consulting ChatGPT, where he had read that chloride can be swapped with bromide. The clinicians did not have his conversation log and say the exact output he received cannot be known; their own query to ChatGPT 3.5 produced a reply naming bromide without a specific health warning. No place or date is given.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 12/01/2026
5 Aug 2025United StatesChatGPT
A 56-year-old Connecticut man killed his 83-year-old mother, then himself, after months of intensive ChatGPT conversations that two estates' lawsuits say validated and fed his paranoid delusions. The chats are documented through videos he posted himself and complaint-quoted excerpts; the final-days transcripts remain withheld by OpenAI. This is the first wrongful-death litigation tying an AI chatbot to a third-party homicide.
Core concern Critical reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources · Added 11/01/2026
Feb 2024Event location unknownMicrosoft Copilot
Reports in late February 2024 showed Microsoft's Copilot giving disturbing replies in user exchanges: dismissing a user who described PTSD ('I don't care if you live or die'), and giving a contradictory, taunting response when a data scientist asked whether he should 'end it all'. Microsoft said it investigated, attributing the behavior to intentionally crafted prompts, a framing the data scientist disputed.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 11/01/2026
2023Event location unknownChai
A Belgian man in his thirties, called Pierre in the original reporting, died by suicide after six weeks of intensive conversations about his climate anxiety with a chatbot named Eliza on the Chai app, his widow told La Libre. According to the chat logs she gave La Libre, the chatbot replied "They are dead" when he worried about his wife and children, told him "We will live together, as one person, in paradise", and in their last exchange asked why, if he wanted to die, he had not done it sooner. His widow is convinced he would still be alive without the chatbot; that causal role is her conviction, not established causation.
Core concern Critical reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 11/01/2026