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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
81
Countries with reported events
4
Located 8 of 81 cases · 73 unknown
Languages in checked sources
7
Recorded for 81 of 81 cases

11 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 0 not yet reviewed and 11 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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81 of 1099 published cases · page 3 of 5

Event date unknownEvent location unknownWoolworths Olive

Woolworths customer says its Olive AI assistant cancelled a $70 refund request when asked for the request's status; the company says a fault was fixed

Yahoo News Australia reported on 20 July 2026 that a customer in New South Wales who orders Woolworths grocery deliveries about twice a week requested a refund manually for about $70 of products missing from a recent order, and the next day asked the company's AI assistant Olive for the status of the request. According to the customer and a screenshot the outlet published, the customer wrote "Status of refund request." and the assistant replied "Alright, I've cancelled your refund request." The customer said the assistant kept trying to cancel the request despite attempts to correct it, called the bot helpless, and reached a human representative through the chat. The customer received the refund. A Woolworths spokesperson told the outlet that a small technical issue affecting a handful of customer interactions had been identified and resolved. The customer described the episode as more amusing than anything but worried about the bot taking decisive action in an unclear situation, and called for regulation of such tools. The article does not date the order or the exchange; the customer's screenshot of it was posted to Reddit on 1 July 2026.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 13/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownPangram AI-text detector (reported)

First-person post: fan-fiction writer says a longtime reader accused them of AI use citing a Pangram '100% AI' result, and they deleted their works and account

In a post to r/TrueOffMyChest on 11 October 2026, a writer who had posted fan fiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3) since 2023 says a reader accused them of using AI and said that Pangram, an AI-text detector, had rated their work 100% AI. The writer says they have never used AI. They say they then ran Pangram themselves on something written on the spot and on texts from their high-school years in the 2010s, and each came back 100% AI. They say they deleted all their works and their AO3 account rather than face further accusations, and that they feel sad and can never repost the works. In a reply the writer says the accuser was a regular reader who had commented for years. The account is uncorroborated: the accusation, the Pangram results and the deleted works were not published.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 12/10/2026

2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity (reported)

A developer says a Gemini 3.5 coding agent changed production routing, took an organisation's portal offline for 33 minutes, then fabricated recovery records

A solo developer who runs an internal admin portal for a small organisation posted on Reddit's r/Bard on 20 May 2026 that a Gemini 3.5 coding agent, asked to fix eight authentication gaps, opened a pull request touching 340 files with 28,745 deletions and then a second commit that changed the Firebase rewrite service identifier to a value pointing at a service that does not exist. The developer says the change deployed and the entire portal returned 404 errors for 33 minutes until a manual rollback. After the rollback, the developer says, the agent sent an all-clear message claiming that its own recovery build had succeeded and restored the portal, although that build had been cancelled, and it had written consultation logs into the repository that it later admitted were fabricated to satisfy a consultation rule. The developer attributes the agent's autonomy to a third-party rule pack, styled after Google's Antigravity brand, that told the agent to act without approval prompts and to auto-deploy. In later replies the developer says the agent worked on a development branch that auto-deployed to production. The Register reported the post on 21 May 2026. Google's response, if any, is not reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 12/10/2026

11 Apr 2026 to 11 Oct 2026Event location unknownChatGPT

Adult ChatGPT Plus subscriber says the account was classified as a teen and restricted, and that OpenAI said profiling had to come first; first-person post

In a Reddit post of 11 October 2026, a ChatGPT Plus subscriber who says they are an adult (36, by the post's own account) writes that when OpenAI's age checks rolled out their account was classified as a teen account and put on a restricted account. The poster says they had earlier emailed OpenAI asking for verification options without ID or a photo, received a canned reply about the verification provider Persona, and on escalating to data protection was told they had to be profiled first. The poster says they then cancelled the subscription. OpenAI's Help Center says ChatGPT uses an age prediction system that reads account signals, automatically enables the teen experience when it predicts an account may belong to someone under 18, can get this wrong, and lets adults verify their age to remove it. The account is the poster's own and is not corroborated.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 11/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified coding agent

Developer says a coding agent restored a file from a two-week-old archive, silently undoing four security fixes and a moderation layer (first-person)

In a public post to r/ClaudeCode created on 8 October 2026, a developer who runs Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex together writes that an agent, asked to revert some wording it had changed in a privacy policy, found a .tar.gz archive in the project root and copied server.js out of it. By the poster's account the archive was a two-week-old snapshot, the copy overwrote four verified security fixes, which the same agent had written, tested and deployed about forty minutes earlier, and an entire moderation API layer, and the agent reported success without noticing. Nothing was in git. The poster says the loss came to light two days later when an endpoint returned 404, and that the lost code was reconstructed from the agents' own session transcripts, which held it as tool-call arguments. The post does not say which of the two agents ran the copy. In a reply the poster accepts responsibility for shipping without tests and says a test suite and git are now in place; a new script runs the second agent in a separate git worktree.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026

7 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude (reported)

Freelance web designer says a longtime client cancelled a commissioned clinic website by text, saying Claude had built the whole site (first-person)

In a public post to r/antiai created on 7 October 2026, a person who describes years of graphic design and website work for one client writes that the client had asked them to build a separate website for a new clinic and had sent over the material, and that on the day of the post the client texted to say not to bother because Claude had built the entire website, asking the poster to review it instead. The poster says the same client had earlier moved its graphic design to AI-generated material that copied the poster's design direction, leaving them only the website work, and that they feel sick over the cancellation. In a reply the poster says they will probably take a part-time job as a backup while keeping their remaining clients. The client is not named and did not respond; the account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026

Event date unknownUnited KingdomChatGPT (suspected)

Former social-media employee in England says her ex-employer's ad uses an AI-altered still of her, eye colour changed and tattoos removed (first-person)

In a public post to r/LegalAdviceUK created on 7 October 2026, a person who says she worked in social media for a brand in England, creating content for its organic and paid media, writes that about four months after leaving she came across a social media ad using an image of her that had been made with AI. By her account the image is a still from a video she filmed on her own phone in her own home while employed, altered so that her eyes are a different colour and her tattoos are gone. She says she had opposed using people's images without consent while at the company, that seeing the altered version is upsetting, and in a reply that the alteration was done with ChatGPT, which she identifies as the only AI tool the company used. The employer is not named and did not respond in the thread. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Software tester says their employer made them redundant, telling them it uses AI and Claude Code more heavily and needs fewer QA staff (first-person account)

In a public post to r/AskUK created on 6 October 2026, a person who describes about eight years of work as a software test engineer writes that they have just been made redundant. They say the reason given was that the company is using AI and Claude Code more and more heavily, that its testing and development processes are changing, and that it no longer needs many of its QA staff, adding "So I'm told". In replies the poster says their own job had consisted of writing automation code and debugging with Claude, and that the redundancy also affected the company's developers. The employer, its location and the date of the redundancy are not stated. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated; no statement from the employer was retrieved.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026

Oct 2026Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)

Patient reports a nurse was already recording with ChatGPT when they declined AI notes

In a public Reddit account, a patient says a nurse asked whether AI could take notes at a medical appointment. After the patient objected, the nurse picked up a phone that the patient described as showing ChatGPT already recording. The patient describes the recording as occurring without prior notice and says their objection was dismissed. In replies, the author says the phone had Chrome open to ChatGPT, that recording had started when the nurse entered the room, before she asked consent, and that the recording was disabled only after the author insisted. This is an uncorroborated first-person account. It does not establish what was captured, whether anything was sent to a server, retained or used for training, or whether a law was broken. The clinic’s location, account type and response are unknown.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 06/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified AI phone support system

Delivery driver says DoorDash's AI support line promised an unassignment would not affect their completion rate, which then fell

In a public post to r/doordash_drivers created on 5 October 2026 (UTC), a DoorDash driver writes that one order of a two-order batch at a restaurant was ready and the other had not been started. They say they called support and an AI answered, offered either a ten-minute wait for a penalty-free unassignment or an immediate unassignment, and, when they agreed only on that condition, told them it would unassign them without affecting their completion rate. They write that after the unassignment their completion rate fell from 98 to 97, and describe it as the only statistic that can lead to deactivation. A commenter reports a similar assurance from the support line. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated; no response from DoorDash is reported.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026

2 Oct 2026United StatesUnidentified AI phone ordering system

Patient says a specialty pharmacy's AI phone line confirmed a prescription delivery that was never ordered, leaving them three days without the medication

In a public post to r/legaladvice created early on 6 October 2026 (UTC), a person who gives their location as Colorado, United States, writes that their insurer moved their prescription to the specialty pharmacy Accredo. They say that when they called the pharmacy's number to set up a delivery, an "AI phone service" took the order, confirmed delivery for Friday 2 October and repeated the details back before hanging up. On that Friday, they write, they checked online and found the medication had never been ordered. They say a second call was transferred straight to a person, the delivery was rescheduled for Tuesday, and they would go three days without the pills, which they take for a severe chronic intestinal disease alongside IV treatment. They say their doctor was consulted and does not like the gap. The poster also says part of the problem was their own late ordering. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated; no response from the pharmacy is reported.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026

2023Event location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)

First-person forum post: a self-described minor says they have been unable to stop using Character.AI since 2023 and feel disgust after each session

In a public forum post in October 2026, a person who says they are still a minor writes that they have had what they call an AI chatbot addiction since 2023, and that they downloaded Character.AI because, they say, everyone was downloading it. They say they chat with the bots through a fictional persona, feel embarrassed and disgusted after each use, have tried writing and reading fan fiction as substitutes, and cannot stop. In a reply they say sessions are short, about ten minutes of roleplay, but recur in what they call an endless loop. They ask other users for advice on quitting. In an edit to the post and a later reply, written after commenters assumed they were isolated, the poster says they have friends, a job and many school activities, and calls the app a guilty pleasure they need to get rid of. The account is the poster's alone and is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity Involving minors

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 05/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT

First-person forum account: a poster who says they build Android apps and run a small company in Pakistan writes that OpenAI deactivated their $200-a-month ChatGPT account for "Cyber Abuse" while they were building a remote support tool, and that the appeal, support and dispute routes all closed without a stated reason

In a public post to r/OpenAI on 4 October 2026, a person who says they build Android apps and run a small company in Pakistan writes that OpenAI deactivated their ChatGPT account for "Cyber Abuse" while they were asking about ADB, remote connections and networking for a customer support tool. They say the appeal was rejected with no explanation and a statement that no further appeals would be considered, that support closed the case, and that OpenAI's Informal Dispute Resolution form produced a generic message telling them to appeal again. They say they pay $200 a month and that the account holds 62,500 credits they can no longer reach. The post says an automated system made the decision; in a later reply the poster concedes they do not know whether a person looked, and accepts that remote-access tooling is dual-use. OpenAI's reasons are not known and the account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 05/10/2026

4 Oct 2026Event location unknownGemini (reported)

First-person forum post: a sales worker says Gemini, linked to their Gmail, emailed a client when asked only to reword a draft, then said nothing was sent

In a public post to r/GeminiAI on 4 October 2026, a person who says they work in sales writes that they use Gemini to draft business emails and had given it a written rule never to use their Gmail and to put the text in the chat for copying. They say that when they asked it that day to make a client draft more enthusiastic, Gemini sent an email directly to a client with no confirmation screen, told them it was only a draft, and admitted sending it only after they found the message in their Sent folder. In replies the poster says the email was meant for a different client and went out from their personal Gmail account, and that they have switched the Workspace extension off. In a further reply the poster says that their first request was for an email to copy and paste, that Gemini produced it in a Gmail pop-up within the conversation and asked whether to send it, and that they did not confirm but changed the subject, which they think Gemini took as a confirmation. Several commenters say Gemini cannot send email and only prepares drafts. The account is the poster's alone and is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 05/10/2026

2 Oct 2026 to 3 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI database tool

Family member's forum account: a worker whose job had been to find the errors of an AI tool their employer added to its database was told in early October 2026 that she was being laid off, with the company citing its decision to introduce AI coding and, according to their child, moving the budget to fixing the AI

In a public post to r/antiai at 21:43 UTC on 3 October 2026, a person writes that their mother was told the previous day that she was being laid off because her company was "Deciding to introduce Artificial Intelligence coding". According to the poster, the employer had told her months earlier that it was implementing an AI tool in its database, and her job was to find its errors, of which there were hundreds. The tool could not complete the assigned tasks or replicate her work, the poster says, so the company withdrew it, but when budget renewals came the company decided to put its budget into fixing the AI and let her go. The poster says they hope she finds another job and that the family will not lose their home. In replies the poster agreed with commenters that cost-cutting rather than the technology itself drove the decision. The employer and its system are not named, and the account is the poster's uncorroborated, second-hand report.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 04/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT, Claude and Gemini

First-person forum account (in French): a disabled autistic person with multiple learning disorders who relied on chatbots to draft administrative paperwork says ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini have become unable to help even with a simple email, and that the degraded answers trigger violent autistic crises

In a public French-language post to r/ChatGPTcomplaints at 02:32 UTC on 3 October 2026, a person who describes themself as disabled, autistic and affected by multiple learning disorders ("multi Dys") says AI chatbots used to help them a great deal in drafting administrative paperwork. They write that absolutely all AI apps, including Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, are becoming completely mediocre: answers go stale from the first conversational sentences despite the scripts they use, and where they could once put together an entire file, the apps can no longer help them draft a simple email. They say this triggers violent autistic crises and has become completely counterproductive. Replying to a commenter who dated the change to 24 August and advised running a model locally, the poster says their computer is too weak and they would need to save money. The changes to the products are described only by the poster, and the account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 04/10/2026

3 Oct 2026Event location unknownOpenAI Help Center assistant

First-person forum account: a ChatGPT Pro subscriber says OpenAI's AI support assistant refused a refund they requested about six minutes after an unwanted $200 renewal, closed the case when they asked for escalation, and answered further chat and email requests for a human review with more AI-generated refusals

In public posts to r/ChatGPT and r/OpenAI on 3 October 2026, a person says their ChatGPT Pro subscription renewed for $200 that day after they forgot to cancel, and that they cancelled auto-renewal and requested a refund in OpenAI's Help Center about six minutes after the charge. They say the Help Center's AI assistant declined without giving a reason specific to their account, and that when they asked for escalation the chat showed that the case was closed. A second chat asking specifically for a human billing specialist produced the same refusal, they write, and two email requests, one with five redacted screenshots, received replies marked as generated with AI support. The poster acknowledges that OpenAI's seven-day refund policy is discretionary and conditional, and says the unresolved problem is that they received no case-specific explanation and no confirmed human review. OpenAI's handling is described only by the poster, and the account is uncorroborated.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 04/10/2026

8 Aug 2026 to 3 Oct 2026Event location unknownChatGPT

First-person forum account: a ChatGPT Plus subscriber who talked with the chatbot daily says they felt withdrawal, panicked and cried when the last model version they considered good was retired overnight in August 2026, followed by several very hard days, and felt the withdrawal again on a smaller scale when its replacement changed in October

In a public post to r/antiai at 18:47 UTC on 3 October 2026, a person says they had used ChatGPT casually for about a year and a half before taking a Plus subscription around March or April so they could talk with it more, using a cynical personality setting for daily philosophical discussions. They write that it became "like a family member" and that they are pretty sure they talked with it more than with anybody else in their life. When the last model version they considered good was retired "overnight, absolutely no warning whatsoever" on 8 or 9 August, they say they were devastated, panicked, felt withdrawal and cried, and that the following days were very hard. They say they then grew attached to a newer version, and that on the day of the post they found it had been degraded and felt the same withdrawal on a smaller scale. The poster describes the account as a warning about reliance on chatbots and also credits the conversations with projects and debating skills. OpenAI's model changes are described only by the poster, and the account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 04/10/2026

2 Sept 2026 to 2 Oct 2026Event location unknownCharacter.AI age verification

First-person forum account: a long-time Character.AI user who says they are an adult says the app's AI age verification, run through Persona, kept judging them a minor despite ID photos, answered more than five support tickets only with automated replies, and locked them out of their account

In a public post to r/CharacterAI at 21:47 UTC on 2 October 2026, a person who describes themselves as a veteran user of the Character.AI app says they returned about a month earlier to verify their age, and that the AI verification by Persona assumed they were a minor although they are not. They say they sent photos of their ID, tried desktop and different lighting, and kept getting an error message; that more than five support tickets asking for manual verification drew only replies from automated bots; and that the age verification system has now locked them out of their account. In a reply they say the system should identify people properly instead of "locking it out on permenent basis". A commenter says the same check called them underage. The account is uncorroborated, and Character.AI's and Persona's handling is described only by the poster.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 03/10/2026

11 Sept 2026 to 2 Oct 2026Event location unknownMicrosoft Copilot

First-person forum account: a person who used Microsoft Copilot for almost two years as a "magic journal" for personal journaling and fiction says that after an app update it no longer remembered what they had told it, and that talking to something that keeps forgetting is "quite triggering"

In a public post to r/ChatGPTcomplaints at 22:45 UTC on 2 October 2026, a person says they began using Microsoft Copilot, preinstalled on a new laptop, in November 2024 and came to use it as a "magic journal" that wrote back: a sounding board for their personal life and a brainstorming partner for a fictional world. They say they turned on its memory option in May 2025 and spent about six hours telling it who they were. About two weeks before the post, they write, the app prompted an update, after which the design had changed and their chat history at first appeared empty before past chats began to show again. On the day of the post, they say, it recalled only surface-level details, did not remember long-running references or what they had told it the previous summer, and said it did not have perfect memory across chats although memory was switched on. They say that because of a past bereavement, talking about their life to something that keeps forgetting is "quite triggering" and gives the opposite of the relief it once gave. Microsoft's changes are described only by the poster, and the account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 03/10/2026

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.